Julieta Caunedo

Cornell University

“No movies tonight,” I announced as water flushed between my legs on that frigid morning of January 11th. Little did I know how much my life was about to change.

“This girl is coming early and we need to do laundry.” Of course, I had been too busy trying to get work settled to even dare open the now many packages of cute clothes and toys piling up in the guest room. The whole notion that I would slow down was not something I would even consider. I will push through this one too, I thought, just as I did with the drowsiness of the first couple of months, the parading through the offices of my male colleagues asking about their own family-leave arrangements, the “negotiating” of a reasonable deal for myself; because by 2017, the policy was still very much at the discretion of the department chair.

After 28 hours of labor, the marathon of my life, we welcomed Amal. I had a massive tear and lost much more blood than I could bear, but I had a beautiful girl in my hands. As soon as she touched my chest, I thought, why on earth did I not do this earlier?

I was on year three of my tenure clock, with a very slow start, and had decided not to wait much longer. I was 33 at the time, and my then partner was older and not willing to grandparent his own daughter. About 27 months later, we welcomed our second daughter, Farrah.

By the time she arrived, I had made peace with the idea that it was impossible for me to compete on speed. Exhaustion and fogginess were taking a toll. No productivity level could compensate for the short daily schedule, the constant and unpredictable kid sickness, the persistent tiredness. The exhaustion wasn’t abstract. Do the math: two children, two years apart, breastfed for 14 months each, night feedings for the first six months, no matter what. How many nights did he say, “Sleep honey, I got this”. But the breast pain wouldn’t subside and I would wake up like a Swiss clock: 11pm, 3am, 6am. How many times did I hear from my male colleagues, “finally, a full night of sleep!” as they arrived at a conference. Not for all of us. Not for all of us, I thought.

That exhaustion forced a strategy. I decided to write less but to produce the best possible quality, with as much ownership and visibility as I could. Risky, but it seemed like the only sensible road. Early feedback from colleagues is important for publication and visibility, the main ingredients for tenure promotion, and disappearing for a year or two, cutting down on travel and interactions, would have meant a real dent in my output. In my case, there was the added issue that I had graduated from a middle-ranked university, so I had no obvious network to tap on and instead had to build one from scratch.

I collected bits and pieces of casual advice while navigating these trade-offs, and much of it was figured out as I went along. Being a working mum carries challenges in any profession. Perhaps one distinct feature of economics is that, with so few women at the top, those starting out are mostly flying solo: relying on the understanding of male colleagues who have been educated in the challenges of motherhood (kudos to you guys); relying on a handful of outstanding senior women who have taken up this issue as a crusade; or relying on no one at all. I remember standing outside a chair’s office, rehearsing how to ask for what I needed, and realizing there was no script to borrow. The last woman granted internal tenure in my department was 10 years my senior.

I feel lucky to have been mentored by a handful of senior colleagues. Francesca, in particular, championed the joy that children bring while remaining pragmatic about the challenges of raising them far from family. “Whenever possible, throw money at it,” she said. And so I did. I built a support system that would free up hours of home production so I could play and spend quality time with my children, and hours of childcare so I could get to work. I also had a wonderful set of coauthors who kindly flexed their schedules — calls at random times, from random places, working while pumping, you name it. Elisa, how many conversations about equilibrium did we have while driving the girls between parties and play-dates? Yes, I know what the reader is thinking. By the time Amal was 5, she’d come up with her own rationing system for traffic distribution while we sat at a red light. She had no option, I guess.

Asking for accommodations through childbearing is not asking for charity or compassion. It is asking for the opportunity to bear the costs of pregnancy without giving up our passion or our ideas. As a profession, we should ask how much talent is lost when women, biologically the ones who carry pregnancies, feel cornered into choosing between family and professional advancement. We cannot design a policy around every possible family path. The cleanest approach then is to build one around childbearing itself. It is a biased policy, deliberately so, since the costs of childbearing are themselves so unevenly borne. It won’t solve every issue women face in this profession. Coauthoring, the very collaboration that makes the work possible, still lowers a woman’s odds of tenure even when productivity and quality of her work are comparable to a man’s (Sarsons, Gërxhani, Reuben, and Schram, 2021). But it will be an important step forward.

Let me part ways with encouragement to the women thinking about, or already going through, the childbearing process. It’s tough, it’s scary, but also insanely rewarding. An extra year won’t be nearly enough, but take it. You do not need to become a superwoman to get through this. There will be plenty of pushing, but be kind to yourself and accept all the support you can get.