Laura Pilossoph

Duke University

In the span of about two years, I had a baby, endured a ruptured ectopic pregnancy which nearly killed me, recovered, and had another baby. Last month, I got tenure. I tell you this not as a triumphant conclusion, but as useful context: I made it through the tenure process while also having two children, and I have some perspective on what helped, what even the best support cannot fix, and why the tenure clock extension exists for exactly that reason.

I want to be clear upfront: I have been fortunate. My colleagues have been supportive and, as it relates to my pregnancy woes, very empathetic. My coauthors have been understanding, picking up a lot of the slack created by my absence. The academic schedule, compared to almost any other profession, is genuinely accommodating in ways that mattered enormously to me. My husband is my equal at home, and also benefits from the flexible schedule of an academic. Without these ingredients, I am not sure I would have gotten through the process as I did.

But even with all this support, and working in a relatively accommodating occupa- tion, pregnancy and post-pregnancy were very difficult. Our work requires us to think about problems for hours at a time. Breastfeeding is, among other things, an interrup- tion that occurs every ninety minutes and cannot be delegated. The two-to-three hour uninterrupted blocks that used to be my most productive time simply ceased to exist. It was not exhaustion, exactly (though that was definitely part of it): it was the constant awareness that the thread was going to be cut again soon, which makes it very hard to pick it up in the first place. The short and frequent interruptions were complemented by longer ones; a bad case of mastitis landed me in the hospital, pelvic floor PT sessions on the regular, and so on. Traveling to conferences during and after pregnancy was difficult. I vomited in countless airports, and at some point I had to cancel seminars because it became too much. After my children arrived, traveling meant pumping all day while away (and carrying around an annoyingly heavy bag full of pumping parts, of which I inevitably forgot one on each trip, leading to a frenzied search on instacart lest another bout of mastitis would return). The ten minute conference breaks were not long enough to allow me to pump and socialize; it was hectic and very unsatisfying.

No amount of goodwill can change the fact that there are physical costs to pregnancy and birth that are nontransferable. No one else can have your ectopic pregnancy. No one else can be hospitalized for your mastitis. No one else can breastfeed your child. No one else can bounce your body back from pregnancy for you. This is precisely why the tenure clock extension for childbearing exists — not as a favor, and not as an accommodation for someone who couldn’t keep up, but as a recognition that the person being evaluated at a tenure meeting may have spent the last few years attempting to continue the intellectual 1 work required by our jobs while their body was doing something else entirely. Is a year the right number? I don’t know- I think what is probably even more useful is sharing how varied- but typically grueling- the experience is for those involved. This series is a start.