Women in academia face significant negative outcomes when becoming a parent. This is in stark contrast to their male colleagues, who are not significantly affected as a result of having a child. On the contrary, new fathers continue to publish at an increasing rate, according to researcher Olof Ejermo in a new SNS report. This puts women at risk of prematurely abandoning their careers and that research talents go to waste.
The efforts to address gender inequality in academia have gone on for decades. However, women and men in academia still differ in terms of employment contracts, career paths and access to research funding, writes Olof Ejermo, professor at Lund University, in the SNS report Research or Family: How Does Becoming a Parent Affect Academic Productivity?
“Research clearly shows that women generally pay a higher price for becoming a parent in terms of a poorer growth in earnings. The report shows that in the case of academia, this mainly concerns declining publication rates compared to men. This, in turn, plays a major role with regard to future career prospects as the publication rate is crucial for being promoted to higher positions and for being granted research funding,” Olof Ejermo argues.
He emphasizes the importance of understanding how academic productivity is affected by researchers becoming parents. First, it is important from a gender equality perspective, through which the underlying causes of career differences are examined. Second, there is the risk of talent going to waste. This may have a negative impact on academia as a whole, as it has been shown that the gender of researchers has an impact on the research carried out.
The report presents a unique and detailed study of how the publishing rates of researchers are affected by having children. It includes data on the publication rates over time of more than 12,000 researchers who are also parents. The results show that women’s publication rates are approximately 40 percent lower compared to men two years after becoming a parent. This gap increases to a whopping 80 percent nine years after the birth of the first child for researchers who remain in academia after becoming parents. These differences are observable in all disciplines – humanities/social sciences, medicine, science and engineering.
The solution to this problem, however, does not appear to be a more balanced utilization of parental leave: “Women utilizing more or less parental leave does not seem to affect their productivity. However, the results show that men who utilize more parental leave actually publish more,” according to Olof Ejermo. Hence, he proposes other areas in which there is room for improvement. For instance, he points to the increasingly fierce competition for research funding.
“In an already strained life situation, the competition for money puts an additional burden on new mothers. In order to achieve a fairer and more inclusive environment in academia, it is also important to look at the hierarchies, structures and networks affecting the research career,” says Olof Ejermo.
About the author
Olof Ejermo, professor of economic history at Lund University and a researcher at Ratio
About the report
The report is part of the three-year SNS research project Higher Education and Research. This project focuses on what the governance, organization and funding of higher education and research should look like in order to ensure high quality and a good utilization of resources. In this report, the researcher examines the outcomes of becoming a parent in relation to having a career in academia.