In addition to time management, many respondents were concerned about inequitable access to benefits, such as leave and day care, for postdocs and graduate students, especially for those who lacked employee status at their institutions (2). In such cases, legislation that is designed to protect employees may not apply, consistent benefits policies may not exist, and access to employee resources like on-site day care, employee parking and dependent health-care coverage may be limited.

Even when the rules are clear, they are often inadequate. Only 23 percent of institutions in the Association of American Universities provide postdocs with a policy of six weeks of paid maternity leave (3). Graduate students, who often don’t have the financial resources to go without pay, fare even worse. Only 13 percent of institutions provide six weeks of paid maternity leave, and 3 percent provide one week of paid parental leave to fathers.

These kinds of problems are typically handled by negotiation between the student or fellow and his or her mentor. Like most of the respondents, Pope was grateful for her mentor’s generous support. “But not everyone is so lucky,” she warned. “We need institution-level support.”

Strategies
Strategies for dealing with the challenges of parenthood were incredibly diverse. Some of the respondents arranged for family day care, shared a nanny, used on-site day care, or relied on nonworking or flexible spouses. They created their own support networks by seeking out other parents on campus. They negotiated help at work from lab mates and passed projects along to collaborators. They managed their time with the help of meticulous planning and task prioritization. They never worked at home or often worked at home; they kept very strict working hours or very flexible ones; they went to work very early or late.

The only strategy that was universally popular was taking advantage of the flexibility of academia.

Faculty members have more control over their work tasks and hours than many other professionals. Flexibility is also the positive flipside to the informal work status of postdocs and graduate students. For example, many respondents mentioned negotiating flexible working arrangements with their mentors. Pope gradually transitioned her focus toward bioinformatic work, which improved the predictability of her schedule and allowed her to work from home one day a week. Even though she still worked full time, she said, it made a big difference just to have one morning when she didn’t have to get her family ready or have to “lug the breast pump around.”

Access to this kind of flexibility is not just a luxury. A large body of research across many kinds of workplaces consistently indicates the importance of workplace flexibility, and workers with access to flexible work practices have both greater job satisfaction and fewer mental-health issues (4).

Advice
Finally, I asked the scientist-parents what advice they would give to early-stage scientists thinking about becoming parents. Despite the inevitable differences of opinion and idiosyncrasies of personal advice, three pieces of advice were offered repeatedly.