Sebnem Kalemli-Özcan

Brown University

I am fifty now. When I was asked to write about this, my first thought was: what a great idea. My second thought was: why didn’t I think of this during all those years in tenure meetings, when I was trying to explain to my male colleagues—most of the time I was the only woman in the room, because even by economics standards, my macro-field has remarkably few—how extending the clock by one year doesn’t even begin to dent the problem? But here we are. And the golden rule of writing well is to write what you know.

I know this.

First pregnancy, 2001

I was twenty-seven, a first-year assistant professor. Everything was going great. No pregnancy problems; if anything, I was more productive. I worked long hours, submitted dissertation chapters to journals, and went to every conference I could. My advisors had told me that by moving to Texas I was making a career mistake—too far from the mainstream—so I had to be everywhere, all the time. I took this to heart.

Then came the third trimester. September 11th happened. Even in a world without social media, the negative energy was total. Travel slowed. I slowed. I was tired, I was eating, and I welcomed twenty extra kilos until I could no longer see my feet.

My son—now twenty-four—was supposed to arrive in January. He decided not to wait. Given the timing (the last week of December, between Christmas and New Year) and the fact that he was enormous, I had an emergency C-section on December 28th. The complications kept me in the hospital for the rest of that festive week. Happy New Year.

Of course, I was back to teaching in January. The next eighteen months were an exercise in logistics bordering on insanity: travelling across the city multiple times a day to breastfeed, because in 2002 pumping technology was not exactly widespread. Conferences? Stopped. Working long hours? Gone. A good day meant managing to concentrate on a paper between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m.

Meanwhile, you learn to gaze upon your male colleagues who arrive at seven, stay until midnight, and come back glowing from the latest NBER conference to tell you how everyone loved their paper. All the things you should be doing too.

The loss

By eighteen months my son was in daycare, and I was clawing back something resembling normalcy. Then: the second pregnancy. This time I worked like crazy—traveling, writing, all of it—because now I knew what happens when the little bundle of joy arrives. Get it done now.

And then, at five months, the miscarriage.

How much time I spent in the hospital, I honestly no longer remember. What I have never forgotten is the look in my first son’s eyes, not understanding why mommy was so sick. I got so scared that I decided: one child. That’s it.

Back to work. But everything—papers, publications, thinking—was in slow motion. The body heals slowly; the mind heals slower. And for our line of work, without the mind, you cannot do much.

There is a saying popular among men in academia: All you need to succeed is time and money. I would revise it: all you need is time, money, and a piece of your mind. Women with children will never have their mind fully to themselves again. A piece of it is gone forever, because you always think of the child first, no matter what.

Becoming invisible

You throw yourself back into it—conferences, research, teaching—but things have shifted, and they never shift back. The lost time is lost. You start to notice that you are becoming invisible next to your male colleagues. At conferences, they talk about the papers they presented and the connections they made during the months you were bleeding in the hospital.

You get used to asking a question in a session and not being heard—only to watch a male colleague ask the same question five minutes later and receive nods all around. You see the pats on the back. You learn not to expect them.

Third pregnancy, 2006

Brave enough to try again. Another bundle of joy arrived on September 6—a second son, who is now nineteen and who brings me so much joy and happiness, all the time. I cannot ask for more and I would not do it any other way. Both my sons are my biggest achievements and happiness.

But this time, I knew more. I planned better. I organized like a maniac and optimized every single minute to perfection. It was still hard, but I had learned to do it my way. And by 2006, the technology had caught up: there were actual breast pumps you could travel with. So I went to conferences. I gave seminars. With my pump. And I FedExed my breast milk home on dry ice.

I cannot tell you the joy I felt when the milk arrived before I did.

(The stress this whole process caused while I was giving an important talk is, naturally, beside the point.)

The math

Three pregnancies. One miscarriage. One emergency C-section. Years of invisible work. A mind that never fully came back to being just mine. Two decades of trying to explain, in tenure meetings, that one extra year does not account for any of this.

One year is not enough. But honestly? Two wouldn’t solve it either—not unless we build a system that actually equalizes the playing field.

In spite of all the effort women like me have put into this problem in economics, in academia, over the last twenty years, we are moving slower than a turtle. Hopefully, these stories will speed things up.