The AstroBetter Parental Leave Wiki

The Parental Leave Wiki hosted by AstroBetter is over two years old and now contains almost thirty entries from four different countries. This wiki was created so that prospective graduate students and job seekers could easily compare parental leave policies at different institutions, and to show institutions how their policies stack up against peer institutions. Since graduate admissions and many hiring decisions will be taking place over the next few months, now is a good time to add your institution’s parental leave policies or make sure that its entry is up to date. If your institution has a fantastic policy that you would like to brag about, make sure it is included! If your institution has a mediocre policy that you would like to see improved, include it too. This wiki is a great place to include information on fellowships and the policies of funding agencies. Because the entries thus far have come from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia, we especially encourage updates from additional nations. With your help, this wiki will continue to grow and develop as a useful resource for the astronomical community.

Maternity Leave: International Comparison

Source: "Children's Chances: How Countries Can Move From Surviving to Thriving" by Jody Heymann With Kristen McNeill

For info on the AAS Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy Special Session on Family Leave Policies for graduate students and postdocs, click here and check out the associated wiki.

CSWA Special Session at the AAS: Family Leave Policies

At the 221st AAS meeting at Long Beach, CA, the CSWA sponsored a special session entitled, "Family Leave Policies and Childcare for Graduate Students and Postdocs." The principal organizers were CSWA members Dave Charbonneau and Laura Trouille.

Slides from the presentations by Dave Charbonneau, Natalie Gosnell, Bob Mathieu, Edward Ajhar, and Charles Beichman are now posted as PDFs at http://www.aas.org/cswa/jan13.html.

Charbonneau's presentation included a report of preliminary results from the CSWA's national survey of department chairs on this topic. Gosnell and Mathieu reported on implementation of a forward-looking policy at UW-Madison. Ajhar reported on the NSF's work-life balance initiative, and Beichman described NASA's fellowship programs and their parental leave policies. Laura Trouille briefly presented preliminary results from the postdoc family leave survey. These results are also posted at the website listed above.

If you couldn't attend the session, take a look at the slides for a snapshot of the current state of this issue, which is critical for 21st century careers in astronomy.

If you'd like to voice your support for improving family leave policies for our community, please consider signing http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/aaron-geller/petition. As of this post, the petition has over 1100 signatures. 

Parental Leave Wiki on AstroBetter

This week's guest blogger is Nick Murphy. Nick Murphy is an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. His research is on solar physics, including the role of magnetic reconnection in solar eruptions. He is active in several community groups in the Boston area that are working for gender equity and racial justice. 

Last year, our colleagues at AstroBetter provided wiki space to catalog parental leave policies at astronomical institutions: 

http://www.astrobetter.com/wiki/tiki-index.php?page=Leave+Policies

The goals of this wiki are: (1) to allow astronomers at different career stages to easily compare parental leave policies, and (2) to encourage institutions to enact better parental leave policies by showing how they compare with peer institutions.  

At this point there are postings for 23 institutions and fellowships in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. We encourage you to post information about your own institution if it is not included.  If your institution lacks a comprehensive parental leave policy or only has unpaid leave, it is important to post anyway so that prospective graduate students and employees know this and the administation can be encouraged to implement something better.  If your institution has a parental leave policy worth being proud of, post so that more people want to go there!  

We especially encourage institutions outside of the US to be included, in part to show how the US measures up internationally.  With your help, we can make this an even better resource for the members of our community who are applying to graduate school, postdocs, and permanent positions.

To read more about parental leave, see previous blog posts on the upcoming winter AAS CSWA Special Session on paid parental leave policies for grad students and postdocs in the U.S., a petition for improved parental leave policies, the CSWA response to the NSF Career-Life Initiative, and how US parental leave policies compare internationally.

Posted by L. Trouille

Paid Parental Leave for Graduate Students

For my first post to the Women in Astronomy Blog, I would like to describe some activities that the Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy is undertaking with regard to parental leave policies for graduate students.

When I joined the CSWA last year, I jumped at the chance to move this issue forward. Of course the entire topic of paid parental leave for employees in the US is enormous and perhaps baffling to our colleagues in any of the 178 other countries that have national laws guaranteeing some form of paid leave for new mothers (50 of these also guarantee paid leave for new fathers). While the US Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 does mandate up to 12 weeks of (potentially unpaid) leave for workers, many students are not considered employees and hence it isn't even clear if the FMLA applies. And besides, one might ask, aren't leave policies at a University the purview of the upper administration (in discussion with the various funding agencies), and thus the desires of the relatively small pool of astronomers students a modest consideration?

Well, I would like to make the case that there is good reason to think that we are going to see some rather interesting developments on this question over the next few years.  At the start of 2012, I mailed a letter to the chair of each of the 28 departments of astronomy and/or astrophysics that offer the degree of PhD, asking for the details of their parental leave and childcare policies for graduate student parents.  And, I was delighted when fully 100% of these recipients sent me a reply! My first pass at the data indicates that we are in a time of rapid change and the current policies vary tremendously between institutions: A number of universities have recently adopted a paid leave policy for all graduate student parents, while others offer no paid leave but do allow students to retain benefits such as health care and students housing; some do not even have an official policy. I also learned that solutions needn't be University wide: The Department of Astronomy at the University Wisconsin Madison has recently implemented a paid family and medical leave policy that is entirely home grown. Way to go Badgers!

My own university could surely do much better, and I point you to the excellent article by two former Harvard graduate students of astronomy, Sarah Ballard (now a Sagan fellow at the University of Washington) and Gurtina Besla (now a Hubble fellow at Columbia University), which was definitely an inspiration to me on this topic both here at Harvard and nationwide.

I do think we need to shift this discussion from one in which the students and postdocs advocate for their own needs to one in which senior faculty, department chairs, and deans advocate on their behalf. With that in mind, Laura Trouille (CIERA fellow at Northwestern University) and I will host a Special Session on Family Leave Policies and Childcare for Graduate Students and Postdocs at the upcoming AAS meeting in Long Beach (this blog post addresses only graduate student leave, but the special session will include leave for postdocs).  The speakers will include AAS President David Helfand, Ed Ajhar (Program Director for the the NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral fellowships, as well as the Extragalactic Astronomy and Cosmology Research Grants), Chas Beichman (Executive Director of the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute, and director of the Sagan fellowships program), as well as Natalie Gosnell (graduate student) and Bob Mathieu (Department chair) from the University Wisconsin (who will tell us how they put their plan into action). I will also present the results from my national survey. The session will be Monday, January 7th from 2:00-3:30pm.

While I hope that many graduate students and postdocs will attend, it is essential that the more senior individuals who are in a position to change policy at their respective institutions participate as well.  So, if you are such a person, please consider attending. If you are a student or postdoc, might I suggest you ask your department chair to identify the faculty member who will represent your department? The goal will be both to inform about current practices, and to discuss specific means by which departments and funding agencies can adopt more supportive policies.

I hope to see you in Long Beach!

Family Leave - International Comparison

A friend (thanks Diego Fazi!) recently posted on facebook the image to the left, showing various national policies for the number of weeks provided for maternity leave. Click here for the raw data.

 Yes, men and women in other countries face other obstacles in achieving work-life balance. This figure is simply pointing out the reality that the Family Medical Leave Act falls short and didn't have to.

The most progressive and useful of the policies provide both maternity and paternity paid leave. Gender neutral policies reflect the reality within our community in which most early-career couples are dual career couples and child rearing is shared by both parents. Gender neutral policies reinforce the message that shared parenting is valued and respected within our community.

Here are a few of these 'best-practice' policies:

• Canada: 55% up to $413/week for 50 weeks (15 weeks maternity + 35 weeks parental leave shared with father) 
• Iceland: 90 days 80% up to a ceiling of 480,000 (€5,300, $6,700) monthly (minimum monthly payment 91,200 (€1000, $1,275) + 90 days to be shared between the parents 
• Norway: 54 weeks (12.5 months) (80%) or 44 weeks (10 months) (100%) - mother must take at least 3 weeks immediately before birth and 6 weeks immediately after birth, father must take at least 6 weeks - the rest can be shared between mother and father. 
• Sweden: 480 days (16 months) (80% up to a ceiling the first 390 days, 90 days at flat rate) - shared with father (minimum 60 days) 

Let's narrow the focus now to our small astronomy community. For a list of current family leave policies for astronomy graduate students and postdocs in astronomy departments in the U.S. (and to add your department's policy if it's not yet listed), please click here.

In terms of bringing change: Already, ~1100 astronomers have signed our petition, voicing their support for improving family leave policies for graduate students and postdocs. I encourage you to sign, and more importantly, find out what the policy is in your department.

Dave Charbonneau (CSWA member) is currently compiling responses to his survey of astronomy department chairs of current policies and practices with regards to family leave, adoption, and childcare for astronomy graduate students and postdocs. Once we have those results, we will share them with the community.

-Laura Trouille (CIERA Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University)

Work-Family: On Balance

As rosy a picture I painted in my previous posting on work-family balance, the truth of the matter is that raising children is not an easy task. Trying to raise children while establishing a career is even tougher. On the good days, I count the number of years until my youngest turns 18. On the bad days, I wonder if I should discourage young women from pursuing careers in science because it's simply impossible to have it all.

While mulling these rather depressing thoughts, I came across this article in the Washington Post, talking about the difficulties of parenting while pursuing a career in business. You could easily substitute "business" for "science" and "executive" for "professor" and everything Sharon Meers says applies equally well. Some choice quotes from the article:

When a father of small kids is late or looks dazed in a meeting, we're more willing to assume it's an aberration, a passing phase, and he'll snap back to top form because he values his job. We give him the benefit of the doubt. Do we give women the same?

After spending a weekend with his kids alone, one male executive told me, "If every man in Congress had to do this, we'd have some very different laws."

Meers writes that VP Joe Biden is setting up a Middle Class Task Force that can address some of these work-family balancing issues from a public policy standpoint. I agree with her that this sounds very promising, especially if they can successfully reframe the problems of working parents "not as women's issues" but as "issues of middle class economic security" as described in the article. Let's hope that this Task Force succeeds.

Interesting links

Someday, I will find enough space in my head and time in my life to come up with an honest-to-goodness posting, but for now I present you with a few interesting links.

Evgenya commented on the previous post about anonymous blogging, and coincidentally, Alice Pawley of ScienceWomen writes about the same subject here, weighing the costs and benefits of anonymous versus non-anonymous blogging.

Another interesting post comes from the always interesting Sociological Images blog, showing a comparison of paid parental leave in industrialized nations. Sadly and unsurprisingly, the US does not stack up well.