How becoming a mother made me a better professor
While becoming a mother presents many challenges to a successful academic career, we should not lose sight of the potential career-related benefits for women who choose motherhood.
By Patricia A. Maurice
21 January 2025, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.14586619
Many studies have demonstrated that motherhood, especially pre-tenure, can negatively impact women’s academic careers. Indeed, one study concluded that “Parenthood causes an unequal impact to the productivity of women in academia, taking 5 years for them to catch up to men.” [1] I have heard more than one male academic colleague questioning whether it was prudent or even fair to hire young female faculty given the ‘baby problem.’ As one male department chair told me, if you hire a female professor, she either has to forego becoming a parent or if she has children, the department has to lower its standards and accept a less productive colleague. This man incorrectly assumed that all women want to be mothers, that motherhood inevitably erodes productivity, and that men never choose to be highly engaged parents, themselves. I’ve also heard men say things like ‘there goes her career’ upon learning that a female colleague or student was pregnant.
I have known many women who delayed starting a family for the sake of their careers, then were unable to conceive. Countless female students and postdocs have told me they wanted to be mothers and therefore had written off academic careers. Yet, as addressed in our previous posts, there are many advantages to having women in the STEM workplace, including at the highest echelons of academia [e.g., 2, 3, 4]. Many women have defied the odds to have highly successful academic STEM careers while being mothers. Some of my friends are major award winners and even members of national academies while also being wonderful mothers. I recently visited Marie Curie’s office and lab in Paris; she was a two-time Nobel award winner (Chemistry and Physics) and a mother. Her daughter was a Nobel prize winner (Chemistry) and a mother, too. There are countless successful women who deliberately chose not to be mothers, as there are successful men who chose not to be fathers.
As social dynamics are changing, parenthood can affect men’s careers, too. Results of a survey of published scientists (more than 10,000 responses from parents) suggested that “men who serve in lead roles suffer similar penalties for parenting engagement, but women are more likely to serve in lead roles and to be more engaged across time and tasks, therefore suffering a higher penalty.” [5] Additionally, the study results “suggest that parental engagement is a more powerful variable to explain gender differences in academic productivity than the mere existence of children, and that policies should factor these labor differentials into account.”
How being a mother improved my academic career in STEM
As an assistant professor, I married a fellow academic and joyfully became a stepmother to two teens, then within a couple of years gave birth to a baby boy, all pre-tenure. While motherhood presented many challenges for my career, it also led to some advantages.
1. I became much more efficient. I learned to focus 100% on work whenever I was in the workplace. When I was with my children, I tried to focus on them, although I often worked long into the night at home after their bedtime. I was amazed at how inefficient many of my male colleagues with stay-at-home wives could be.
2. I became better organized. As a mother, it was hard to work long uninterrupted hours on a single project. If I was working on a project, I organized it so that if I had to drop it for hours or days, I could quickly pick up exactly where I had left off. My grants and publication rates did not seem to be impacted negatively by motherhood. My personal observations on organization and efficiency mirror results of published studies [6].
3. I learned to ‘just say no’ to many non-essential activities. Academics who attend too many conferences, serve on too many committees, and spend too much time away from their offices and labs can sometimes become less productive as researchers, teachers, and even administrators. The exception seems to be people with formal assistants, laboratory managers and technicians who can oversee many day-to-day activities.
4. I learned how to run shorter, more productive meetings. You can read about my meetings strategies in previous blog posts [7, 8, 9].
5. I avoided negative colleagues whenever possible. Children suffer when their parents are stressed out; one way to prevent work stress from impacting children is to walk away from negativity at the office. Sadly, this is not always possible.
6. Playing with my son made me more creative and gave me new problem-solving skills. As adults, we often stop playing and lose our creativity. The comedian John Cleese taught a wonderful class on adult playtime and creativity [10]. Learning to deal with a toddler’s temper tantrums made it easier to deal with some of my colleagues more effectively.
7. Watching our sons grow up helped me understand my male colleagues and students. As a professor in a college of engineering, I was generally surrounded by colleagues who had grown up as boys whereas I had grown up as a girl. Our sons taught me about some of the stresses, conflicts, and pressures that boys and men face and about how much boy’s toys and activities are often geared to building strengths in STEM.
8. Watching how societal pressures caused our daughter and other girls at her high school to shy away from STEM made me more committed to serving as a positive role model and to encouraging young women.
9. Interacting with my children and their friends made me more compassionate and a better teacher and mentor especially to students with disabilities. Like many academics, I was a high achiever who lived inside her own thoughts. This shielded me from typical peer pressures. Getting to know young people who had disabilities and/or who were trying to navigate a world dominated by peer pressure changed how I taught and mentored.
10. The experience of becoming a mother, giving birth, and juggling family and career allowed me to become a mentor to other parents. When I became a mother, I didn’t have senior women in STEM to go to for advice, mentoring, or support. It has been my privilege to help many early and mid-career women and men in STEM to make the system work better for them. By becoming a mother, I became the role model I never had.
Overall, I believe I became less arrogant, more open-minded, happier and hopefully a better person. Of course, I know and admire many women who never became mothers, whether by choice or through circumstance.
It wasn’t all fun and games
Being a mother did have some serious negative impacts, partly because I fell into the societal trap of expecting too much of myself. Another important contributor was the demands of academia, which perfectly fits the definition of a “greedy job” that expects to much of its workers [11]. The exhaustion was often unbearable, leading to illnesses such as worsened asthma and repeated bouts of pneumonia. I spent years hardly sleeping or eating and became too thin for a while. There were times when I was so overworked that I got to the middle of a sentence and couldn’t remember what I’d been saying. It wasn’t just me; one of my STEM female faculty friends asked her doctor to test her for early onset Alzheimer’s several months after giving birth. He told her she was just experiencing the joys of being a new mom. Many students over the years told me they didn’t want to be so overworked and would never consider becoming a professor. I gradually decreased the amount of field work I did in favor of more laboratory-based research so I would not need to be away from home for long periods, although I sometimes brought our kids into the field with me. Having a special needs child was a major factor in my decision to go emeritus at a relatively early age and to walk away from an often hostile work environment.
The bottom line
Women deserve to be successful academics and to experience the pleasures of motherhood if they so choose. There are many men who find great joy in fully engaging in childcare and homemaking responsibilities, too. Young women and men should not have to turn themselves into old-school men to succeed in academia. I’ve loved every second with my children. I wanted to be the kind of mother who gave her baby a bath, made dinner, read books, went to school plays and concerts and athletic events and who grew into a sweet, loving grandmother. The problem for men and women is not parenthood per se. The problem is the entrenched system in academia that often focuses on disadvantages without adequately recognizing, fostering, and rewarding advantages, as well as societal expectations for gender roles in the home (often internalized by female academics). It’s time for a change in attitude and approaches that will make the academic STEM workplace more humane and effective for men and women whether or not they choose parenthood.
Questions for further thought
· Do you think things have gotten better or worse for parents since you began your career?
· Have you parented a special needs child? If so, what sources of help and support were you able to find? How equitably did your partner participate in parenting?
· If you are a mother, how has it affected your career and that of your partner?
· How have you and your partner discussed and allocated caring responsibilities?
References
[1] Morgan, A.C. et al. (2021) “The unequal impact of parenthood in academia” Sci. Adv. 7: eabd1996, https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abd1996
[3] https://www.epistimi.org/blog/the-moment-of-lift-by-melinda-gates
[5] Derrick, G.E. et al. (2022) “The relationship between parenting engagement and academic performance”, Scientific Reports, 12: 22300. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-26258-z
[6] Ward K. and Wolf-Wendel L. (2004) “Academic motherhood: Managing complex roles in research universities” Rev. High. Ed. 27, 233–257 (full text available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236817807_Academic_Motherhood_Managing_Complex_Roles_in_Research_Universities)
[7] https://www.epistimi.org/blog/successful-academic-meetings-part-1-preparation
[8] https://www.epistimi.org/blog/successful-academic-meetings-part-2-chairing-a-meeting-fgnk3
[10] Cleese, J. (1991) “Creativity In Management,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g
[11] Harford, T. (2023) “Why are some jobs so “greedy?” https://timharford.com/2023/11/why-are-some-jobs-so-greedy/