The Impossible Equation Of Being A Researcher Mother, Striving To Make Ends Meet

(MENAFN- The Conversation) How can we encourage women to pursue scientific careers? In recent years, a number of mentoring or awareness campaigns have been put in place to encourage French high school students to study maths, physics or engineering sciences, while they remain underrepresented in these fields. One of the last large-scale initiatives is the Filles et Maths program, launched in 2025, including work on gender bias, the implementation of“role models” or timetables featuring flexible hours.

The program was nonetheless met with criticism: while women remain under-represented in some disciplines, they also remain a minority in the highest positions across the board in the academic world, from mathematics to social sciences.

In France, gender inequalities are therefore not limited to access to scientific studies: they cut across all university careers and make many women leave French Higher Education and Research before securing tenure. This“drain” is explained by several factors among which motherhood holds an important place. A survey in Denmark illustrates that unlike men, one in three women abandon their scientific career after the birth of their first child.

The survey I have been conducting among doctoral students and social scientists highlights the difficulties faced by women who became mothers before becoming permanent employees. Since the 1980s, recruitment requirements have become tougher with candidates needing to have written a good PhD paper, regularly have their work published, participate in scientific events and get involved in the life of research labs. Much of this work falls under hope labour, that is, unpaid work done in the hope of future employment.

In this context, what could be called the myth of the “total researcher” takes shape. This is based on the double penalty of being a productive scientist (without necessarily receiving any financial reward) and embodying the ideal of a career woman, devoted companion, and dedicated mother all rolled into one.

However, this ideal of the“total researcher” clashes with the actual conditions of scientific work and motherhood.

Paying the motherhood penalty in academia

Becoming a full-time researcher requires mothers who aren't tenured researchers to reorganise their lives. Some cram several days' work into one by doing casual work, part-time teaching, unpaid scientific projects, and parental responsibilities. The pace often makes women work under pressure, sometimes at the expense of the quantity and quality of their scientific work.

Other women choose to remain unemployed or take parental leave and thus link their career to that of their spouse if they earn enough. If this strategy of linked career is favourable for scientific production when you have a child, it also creates material dependence that could lead to sexist and sexual violence within the family unit, which this testimony from Jeanne, a doctor and mother of a little girl, illustrates:

In a professional context, where every moment must count, maternity, parental or sick leave become scientific working hours in themselves.

Rebecca, for example, shared that she continued writing her final thesis when her son was sent to hospital in an emergency. This situation feeds a feeling of double guilt: the respondents believe they are never up to par, neither as mothers nor as researchers. Joana explains:

Some non-tenured researcher dads, on the other hand, benefit from an academic paternity bonus. The gendered division of domestic and parental tasks, as well as taking paternity leave, sometimes allows them to devote more time to their research. To quote Marion's doctor of History husband's words:“I have completed nearly two articles in one month of paternity leave!”

The 'initiatory rite of passage' rhetoric

Even when they reorganise their lives to ensure their scientific activity, non-tenured researcher mothers face disqualification mechanisms from their peers.

Some remarks that seem kind on the surface often come back to motherhood:“You should spend more time with your children,”“they must miss you”, or“where is your child?”

Other colleagues, often women incumbents, the difficulties that non-incumbents face in reconciling motherhood and scientific work seem perfectly normal, presenting them as inevitable trials. Louise reports how one female colleague explained to her:

While such pep talks are meant to be comforting, the constraints related to motherhood appear as an obligatory rite of passage to becoming a 'total' researcher.

Motherhood-related constraints that become faults

Due to increasing competition in the French Higher Education & Research system, motherhood can be used against some women as a means of sidelining them. Some respondents said they were excluded from scientific events on the basis that they now had“better things to do” with their children.

When precarious researchers voice their concerns at meetings, their difficulties in reconciling scientific work and motherhood are disqualified on the grounds that they“knew” what having a child meant before becoming a tenured researcher.

The constraints related to motherhood end up remaining invisible behind criticism about a supposed lack of scientific productivity, which tends to arise from pregnancy onwards, through comments on untenured researcher mothers-to-be's physical appearance and how they supposedly mismanage stress with regards to important deadlines in their careers.

Anouk recounts that, after auditioning for a position as a lecturer when she was pregnant, a member of the jury who said she wanted to help her“reminded him” that committees were looking for“nice people to chat to at the coffee machine”, before offering her the following advice:

The complaints also concern the routes travelled to academia: not attending certain events organised during the school holidays, taking on casual work or failing to develop other research subjects that are unrelated to their PhD; are frequently associated with a lack of scientific commitment, thus obscuring the financial and family-related constraints these women face.

A case of the fate of Sisyphus?

Faced with the impossibility of achieving the tenured researcher ideal, many respondents end up internalising their challenges as individual failures and gradually abandon academia.

This distance from academia is actually the result of structural constraints that make it difficult to reconcile motherhood and careers in research. Élodie expresses a sense of exhaustion with the predicament:

In this context, in Higher Education and Research, schemes like France's Filles et Maths Maths program are not going to be enough to reduce inequalities. More broadly, rethinking the criteria around tenure is what needs to happen.

The current requirements favour women with sufficient material resources and time, to the detriment of people experiencing family, social or financial constraints. This marginalisation is not only unequal: it is harmful to research. By depriving people of certain talents, it also deprives them of certain knowledge.

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This article was originally published in French

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