First Summary Blog post: Work-Life Balance

There are over 1000 blog posts on the women in astronomy blog! The summary blog posts are a series of posts that summarize some of the major topics covered in the women in astronomy blog. They are intended to be part summary of topics covered as well as to add some updated information on those topics. Please suggest other topics in the comments!

Sometimes the best work-life balance is to do both at the same time! One of my hobbies is to play with various aspects of 3D printing. I am demonstrating what my 3D printer can do at the annual Institute for Astronomy Open House. 

The first topic for the summary blog posts is on work-life balance. Why? Because it's Sunday, and I'm splitting my day between writing this blog post, preparing for an upcoming conference, and keeping the Pan-STARRS processing moving along.  Clearly, I need to work on my work-life balance.  Since I don't have kids, I'm primarily interested in how to make it so that I do more than just work.  For me, posts that discuss how to set boundaries, how to say no to things, and how to set a reasonable number of hours to work are what I consider 'work-life balance'. When writing this post, I discovered that the majority of the blog posts on work-life balance are geared towards balancing a family and a career. However, I caution it's not just the women (and men!) with children that want to manage work-life balance, this is something that probably all of us can work on. Making a workplace culture more flexible and family friendly helps everyone out.  

I did a search for 'work-life balance' on this blog, and came up with 174 matching entries.  I sifted through all of these, sorted and culled them, found updated links, and organized them into several categories. 

Parental leave policies 2.0

The US remains the only developed country that has no national policy or law providing for paid parental leave. As a result, a plethora of different policies are utilized by employers and organizations. Several years ago the CSWA began a useful list of parental leave policies at astronomical institutions. Readers unfamiliar with this will find it interesting to compare their institution with others.

The vast array of different policies offers an opportunity to assess the effectiveness of different leave policies. Which policies promote employee well being and success? Which are the best for recruiting, retaining, and advancement of all workers? Which policies do employees most like? Do policies exacerbate or ameliorate inequality?

These questions are investigated by social scientists. Recently I've been reading some of the literature, motivated by two considerations.

The first is the periodic assessment of my own university's policies for paid parental leave and, for faculty, tenure clock extensions. The policies were enacted about 15 years ago in order to remove barriers to the success of women faculty, and were explicitly gendered. For example, we grant one-year tenure clock extensions automatically to birth mothers but others must request the extension. Is this fair? Is it effective? It is certainly effective for many individuals, but is it the most effective for everyone?

The second factor is an important new law in Massachusetts, a significant revision of the Massachusetts Maternity Leave Act. The new parental leave law enhances the US Family Medical and Leave Act by requiring 8 weeks of parental leave for all employees, regardless of gender, for the adoption or birth of a child. Crucially, the law states that an "employee on parental leave for the adoption of a child shall be entitled to the same benefits offered by an employee on parental leave for the birth of a child." It has been described by some as a paternity leave law.

Gender dynamics is no longer binary. Gender-neutral parental leave laws and employer policies are important for protecting the rights and supporting the success of LGBT parents including those who adopt. Considerations of LGBT equality were not part of the calculus when our policies were implemented more than 15 years ago, but they are important now.

Sociologists study leave policies and their effect on organizations. Sara Mitchell has compiled a listing of faculty parental leave policies. Erin Cech and Mary Blair-Loy have studied "flexibility stigma" among academic scientists and engineers, which they define as the devaluation of workers who seek or are presumed to need flexible work arrangements.They note that the stigma applies to men and women, and that all suffer the consequences. Avoidance of this stigma is one of the reasons many universities have adopted gender-neutral parental leave laws. On the other hand, some have argued that policies favoring women are necessary because men will use parental leave to further their research careers instead of for childcare. Researchers Jennifer Lundquist, Joya Misra and KerryAnn O'Meara find otherwise. They provide excellent guidance in a recent article in Inside Higher Ed and emphasize the need to destigmatize leave-taking as mommy's work. They provide excellent summary advice for any, like me, who are looking at their university parental leave policies:

"Cultural change recognizing the need for ... work-family balance policies is crucial. Faculty members should be made aware of and encouraged to use available work-life policies in order to promote a culture of use. Strong support from the administration in favor of balanced lives has important multiplying effects on campuses. Departmental chairs can set cultural standards by holding important meetings during school hours and scheduling teaching slots during school hours for parents of children. Part of changing the culture is also publicizing best practices. Administrators should publicly recognize departments with a good track record of benefit usage and supports." -- Lundquist, Misra and O'Meara.

Returning to the questions I posed at the outset, we have few answers. We know that stigmatization is associated with social class and identity, and that parental leave policies reduce stress of those using the policies, at least the stress around parenting. (Eldercare and other family and medical needs also cause stress and loss of productivity, and are not always given as much attention as childbirth and childcare.) I have not seen a study showing the effectiveness of leave policies in terms of recruitment, retention and advancement of employees. Perhaps an informed reader will help!

Postdoc Parenting Work-Life Balance

There's a koan in academia for when is the best time to have a kid:

No time is the right time, all times are equally good (bad?)

My husband is also a postdoc. We have a 9 month old. This is a glass half full kind of post, about how we've taken advantage of the flexible hours, the autonomy, and a few supportive policies to pursue parenting and work on our own(-ish) terms. 

The short of it is that at least one of us was home with our daughter full time until she turned 4 months old and at least one of us continues to be home with her four days a week. Here's how we do it:

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.

NSF's Career-Life Balance Initiative: A Small Success Story

Guest Post: The below post was submitted anonymously by an astronomy post-doc. 

I recently was in one of those exciting conversations with an NSF Program Officer in which s/he is providing feedback from the review panel that is suggestive that your grant has been approved for funding given a few minor tweaks.

Then the bomb dropped. NSF would like the start date to be in the coming few months and the program to launch this summer. PANIC. I am a post doc just ending the first trimester of my first pregnancy, I haven't yet told my advisor who is also on the phone, and I am due at the start of the summer, exactly when the NSF would like for the program to launch.

Inspiring New Policies from Spain for Gender Parity in STEM

Last week I attended an International Astronomical Union conference on Active Galactic Nuclei, hosted by the Armenian Academy of Sciences. Over dinner, Pepa Masegosa Gallegoa, woman astronomer from Spain, described some of the initiatives her country has undertaken to improve the gender ratio in the sciences in her country.

• Equal ratio of men and women on review panels, committees, etc.
• Concerted effort to increase the number of women in Spain’s Academy of Science. Just this past year, the number has risen from a few percent to ~15 percent!
• Four month paid family leave for both parents (this is not new to Spain, but I still wanted to include it in their list of positive policies)^1.
• Providing a ‘stop the clock’ equivalent for grants/fellowships/etc. restricted to applicants within a certain number of years post a given career stage. ‘Stop the clock’, in this case, refers to providing an additional year for each child past the usual date you can apply for these awards. 
• Recommending and encouraging that parents place the year of when they have a child on to their CVs, so that it becomes a normal part of the process to take into account the impact of having a child on productivity.

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.