Many women Ph.D. graduates are delaying becoming parents until they find a career in education, says a major international study whose results suggest that young mothers face a significant shortage of professionals.
Based on a global survey of 8,097 academic parents, the study was recently published in the journal Springer higher education identified the main trends of scholars depending on their gender, with women more likely to complete a Ph.D. before age 30 and delay parenthood until after age 35.
In contrast, men were more likely to become parents during their doctoral studies and often had three or more children by age 40.
Delaying parenthood until after age 35 was “particularly prevalent” among women born after 1970 (two subgroups of the study), who tended to wait until about seven years after their Ph.D. the end of having children, explains a study conducted by researchers based in Germany, the UK, Canada and the US
That trend may reflect the “widely recognized, if problematic, point that the early years of schooling are the result of long-term academic success,” said the study, whose respondents were mostly from the US, UK and Canada.
Young mothers also saw “significant penalties” in long-term scientific impact, as measured by citation rates, compared to men who had children before receiving their doctorate, who were “not significantly penalized.”
There was no “significant gender difference” in Ph.D. the achievement of those who had no children, while women who delayed becoming parents until after age 35 had similar citation rates to their male peers, the paper notes.
The findings reinforce evidence that “parenthood tends to support men’s upward trajectories while suppressing women’s,” and women are more likely to transition into teaching-oriented roles despite similar career aspirations, the paper argues.
Noting “asymmetric effects [of parenthood] for women and men,” said its lead author, Xinyi Zhao, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany and the Leverhulme Center for Demographic Science at the University of Oxford, told. Times Higher Education that “women are more likely to experience conflict between the demands of work and parenting than men are.”
“Importantly, our findings are not an argument to encourage women to delay parenthood further. Rather, they highlight an ongoing structural problem: Even if academics have achieved broad gender parity at the doctoral level, the leaky pipeline remains a serious problem, and parenthood is the primary conduit for it,” Zhao continued.
“Women who become parents early are more likely to drop out of school—not because they lack the ability or ambition, but because the program is not designed to deal with the reality of their lives,” she added.
Programs such as the UK’s Athena Swan program, designed to improve the representation of women in UK universities, “address directly” these structural challenges, said Zhao, who said that “there is a real danger that universities will be drawn to more visible, easy-to-use interventions, such as role models, speaker series, women’s organizations without requiring positive changes, because they require difficult ones.
“They have low costs and low conflict, which makes them attractive. But our findings suggest that universities need to be precise and honest in their assessment of what the problem really is,” he said.
“Models and target representation are very important, but they deal with downstream symptoms rather than upstream causes,” said Zhao, who emphasized that “the difficult, slow work is structural reform, and universities are very careful to follow through.”
Efforts to help academic mothers should “go beyond recruitment programs and targeted representation,” he continued, saying that they should “actively monitor and support what happens in women’s careers after their employment, such as tracking promotion rates, grant success, publication results, and retention in important career changes, and being willing to ask why women leave or stop at certain points.
“Regular assessment of employee experience, especially where care and work pressures intersect, can provide universities with more actionable information than separate statistics alone,” Zhao recommended.
“The question should not be ‘how many women we have’ but ‘what happens to their jobs when they are here, and at what point do we lose them,'” she said.
“Our findings suggest that the problem is not that women lack motivation or self-confidence. The structure of academic work itself, including fixed-term contracts, continuous expectations of productivity, rigid grant periods, does not constitute care,” said Zhao.
“Until universities state that problem clearly in their equity strategies, the interventions they design will continue to correct something that is wrong. The examples have real symbolic value, but a woman seeing another successful female professor does not change the fact that her fellowship clock will not stop for a while when she has a child, or that taking maternity leave during a postdoc may end her next position,” explains her next opportunity.
“That’s what needs to be fixed, and it requires universities to be more specific about what they’re trying to change,” Zhao said.
