A story in three acts
My story is perhaps not the most obvious one for One Extra Year. I was lucky: I was voted tenure at 32, right before I had my first child. I never had to worry very much about adding a year to my tenure clock.
But I have thought about maternity and its consequences, unavoidably. So here is my story, in three acts.
Act I: The children I didn’t have yet
When I was a junior faculty member at Stanford, my senior mentor told me that I had a lot of potential as a researcher, but, ‘unfortunately,’ he literally said, ‘I was a woman. One day, I would have children, and then I would stop being a good researcher and become a good mother.’
There was no choice in his story. This was simply what was going to happen.
The strangest part is that he meant it as a compliment. I was doing unusually well. I was serious about research. In some sense, I had almost managed to become one of the guys. It was just unfortunate that this could not last.
Economists have become very good at documenting the child penalty: the large and persistent divergence in women’s and men’s careers after the arrival of children. But there is another penalty that is much harder to see in the data. It starts before children arrive. Sometimes it starts before a woman has even decided whether she wants them.
In my case, my mentor had already incorporated my future children into his expectations about my career, even before I had given maternity much thought.
Act II: Pushing through
Eventually, I had children in 2017 and 2019. I was fortunate to have two healthy children when I had already been voted tenure.
I did not stop being a researcher. I just pushed through, with mixed success. I got some funny stories out of it, too.
When one of my children was only a couple of months old, I arrived at the airport without my driver’s license or a credit card. The officer was willing to let me go through by calling Homeland Security, but really, no, thank you. I went back home, defeated.
On another trip, I went through airport security with about a liter of breast milk. The security officer looked at the milk, looked at me, and asked why I needed all that milk when I didn’t even have a baby with me. No kidding!
I also remember the daycare notification on my computer while I was teaching a class to undergraduates: my daughter had a “runny diaper.” She was around four months old.
These are funny stories now. But they capture something difficult to see in a CV. The seminars still happened (or most of them!). The papers still got written. Looking at the outcomes, you might conclude that having children did not cost me very much.
But the exhaustion was very real, and it lasted for many years because I did not allow myself to stop.
Act III: Ready to Come Back
Reflecting on my own experience, I wondered: why did I do all of it? The answer was probably a combination of momentum (and inability to say no), FOMO, and fear of its long-run consequences.
So I had an idea. After having a baby, researchers could disappear from conferences and seminars for a while without worrying that people would stop asking or assume they had “checked out.” When they were ready to travel again, they could simply let the network know. I called it the “Ready to Come Back” program. Or, really, just a button.
I was so proud of it.
But the response I got was that people might abuse the program to get more seminar invitations.
This response captured the problem better than my proposal ever could. I was thinking about women pumping milk between meetings and saying yes because they worried about what would happen if they started saying no. Yet, they were worried about someone strategically getting an extra seminar invitation.
They could not comprehend what we were going through.
Perhaps that is also why the child penalty is so difficult to fix. We can count publications, earnings, months of leave, and years added to a tenure clock. We are much worse at seeing everything around them: the expectations that start before children even exist, the pressure to push through once they do, and the cost that becomes invisible, and can linger for a long time, precisely because we manage to keep going.
The Ready to Come Back program never made it very far. But let’s hope the world is ready for it in the not-so-distant future!
