NSF Launches New Family-Friendly Policies
Dear friends of women in science,
Several of you emailed me about the new initiative at NSF, featuring more family-friendly policies. I suspect quite a few people have been taken by the point, finally, that family-friendly ways of operating help both young women and young men, and can make all the difference in some cases between retention in science and leaving the field. We've discussed these issues before, for example here and here.
Specifically, NSF will now allow award recipients to defer an award for up to 1 year or receive a no-cost extension to an existing grant. Because reviewing grants can often position scientists to write more successful proposals, they have a plan to increase "virtual reviewing" so that people can participate in proposal reviews without having to travel to their headquarters in Arlington, VA (where I personally got snowed in for almost a week once when I was reviewing NSF Graduate Fellowship applications).
And another very important component is a new program allowing current grantees to apply for a supplementary award when going on family leave, allowing them to hire a technician to keep their labs moving forward. I really like that part, but since it's the part that costs more, it may not last in today's tight economy. So if you know young women who need to know about it, pleast spread the word asap.
You can read about this program on the Science web here.
cheers,
Laura
I think Postdoc Cat is correct. We do not have cheap child care, and without that, if get pregnant, women postdocs may have to drop out of science. Or if it's supposed to be cheap, there are no spaces of kids of postdocs, only faculty and senior staff.
Ah, Postdoc Cat, you have good political instincts! If that kind of pressure came from NSF and NIH, universities would step up and take on making the fertile years the actual time of childbirth. Now, women scientists typically wait until after tenure, so they are in an experiment: will it extend the life spans of all of their kids, or will they have mutations due to their occytes' long existence stalled in meiosis, mutations that are difficult to deal with medically?
cheers,
Laura
Wow, I would love that Yen C. But really, all of these ideas are steps in the right direction. What I would like best of all would be NOT to give grants to R1 universities unless they offer childbirth leaves to postdocs and grad students and have affordable child care with reasonable space for the kids of postdocs and grad students.
Well, I think a supplement for a postdoc might be even better than all of these ideas to really help a woman who is taking off six months after childbirth. How well can she keep on top of what's going on with a tech right after childbirth?
For me, the supplement sounds best. I've seen women struggle with too many balls in the air when they have a child in the midst of the pre-tenure period. I wanted to scream with them at a few times when policies that seemed to support them were used against them (lower productivity than a male would have, etc). The technician, if he/she could overlap so training was possible, would make a huge difference.
FBP
Hi Laura,
I think one of the biggest barriers is not knowing how to write a good proposal, so I would say the virtual reviews might help the most. But at a specific time (childbirth), I realize the supplement could make or break a tenure decision, so maybe I should have picked that one. Hard choice!
KLS
