Could shared post-docs improve work-life balance and make academia more attractive for early career scientists?
Naturejobs journalism competition winner Ulrike Träger.
If you look for advice on work-life balance in science online, the message seems clear: it’s possible to fit a 10-hour work day around quality time with your kids and family as long as you’re organized. Flexible hours of working in the lab help. Experiments don’t mind when you do them, and can be postponed until your kids are asleep. But still, long hours are expected in order to be successful, and finding childcare during midnight experiments is not always easy if you don’t live close by. So for many (including myself, a post-doc in my late twenties pondering the right time to start a family) the prospect of having to plan each and every minute of the day to be a good parent and scientist is daunting. This leaves promising young scientists everywhere feeling like they have to choose between family and career.
But should “be organized” really be our best advice for anxious parent-scientists? Should we not rather try to promote flexible models beyond working 10 hours a day to keep highly trained, young scientists, who want to prioritize their families, in academia?
One option would be the much frowned upon part-time post-doc. Only 2.5% of post-docs work part-time, and many post-docs and PIs will tell you that ‘part time’ and ‘post doc’ just don’t mix. But I haven’t seen much opposition for shared post-docs, where two post-docs share the same research project. Two (part-time) pairs of hands would mean a project still moves along at a lively pace, whilst still allowing long experimental set-ups to be covered.
In addition to workload, two minds can only be beneficial in designing new experiments and approaches. From a PI’s perspective, there also seems to be few financial downsides in hiring two part-time post-docs instead of one full-time post-doc, and the concept of “job-sharing” is already in use in companies such as BASF. So why is this model nowhere to be found in academia? Surely it’s not due to a lack of demand.
No. As a post doc myself, my guess is what’s holding this model back is the stigma that if a scientist is not committed to working 50-60 hours a week they have no place in science. I’m not sure where this comes from, but I imagine that the pressure to publish high-impact first author papers, to be able to secure funding, has something to do with it.
New open-access publishing strategies and assessments based on smarter paper metrics may start to decrease this pressure. But still, the bigger problem is our mindset, as grants are often awarded by peer-review. It is on us as a community to change our thinking when reviewing CVs – part time work, shared post-docs and children should no longer be seen as a problem, or can we afford to let all these highly qualified people go?
Ulrike is a post-doc at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg. Her research focuses on the development of immune cells in different tissues. Outside the lab she loves to travel and run, ideally combining the two. You can follow Ulrike on Twitter or her blog.
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I can personally attest that it is impossible to compete as a woman with children. Not because family life is incompatible with a career, but because the very basic needs of a family are not being met. I did not have this issue in Canada, but in the US I found very few if any resources available and far too many additional obstacles to tackle. To secure even the basics, such as education for children, was often a struggle. I had to homeschool for an entire semester while waiting for a school placement for my daughter. The rent was far too high for us to afford, yet we were asked to move out of residence, only 6 months before the end of my contract. It just appears that families in general are struggling and women are often the default parent to stay home.
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The problem with this idea (in the US) is medical benefits. Part-time positions don’t qualify for employer-supplied healthcare insurance, which means you would have two shared people missing out on an essential component of employment.
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“Be organized and fit family life around 10 hours of work” is the best advice for anyone who wants to ruin their marriage and earn a burn out. Lots of this pressure we put on ourselves pre-emptively rather than other people putting that pressure on us. It is happening in our very own heads. When I started a family, I tried to keep my well-trained science routines, too. But I quickly realized that work after 20:00 was non-productive yet very painful (of course – I was up since 6 am and I was tired). I also realized that accepting the 9-to-5 frame given by childcare and delegating everything that could be delegated made me – to my utter surprise – more successful. My grant applications went through, I focused on the few experiments that mattered, I thought three times before starting something instead of just once – and it paid off. My conclusion: Don’t embrace pressure from other people. Don’t make it your own. Instead, think what is reasonable. Think about what a human being can possibly achieve in a day and stay mentally and physically healthy at the same time. And if other people want you to cross those borders, realize that it is your responsibility to stand up against it. Gently, but firmly and clearly.
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What it is funny to me is the fact that most young scientists nowadays are deluded by the idea of being a (fancy) world-class scientist, highly cited, highly followed in Twitter, highly invited for talks, and a lot more “highlies”. That is not and has never been the goal of science, but the goal of being famous (at any profession; especially arts and media-related ones). Look back to people who changed the world with their research such as Einstein, Mendel, Darwin, Stephen Hawking, Kary Mullis, Tesla, Marie-Curie, etc, etc. and you gonna find all sorts of life-work-family (im)balance. Did they change the world because they had (or didn’t have) a balanced life-work-family or because their ideas were brilliant? Science is a job as any other! In a capitalist world, you’re paid = you work. Be efficient. Do not waste your time with futility. Do not procrastinate. If you wanna be an workaholic, have kids, hike in the mountains, have summer in the beach, visit parents twice a year in another continent and so on, I am sorry to tell that you won’t be very good at any of these. As a result, you’ve got disappointment and pressure upon yourself. If your ideas are fantastic, you gonna get all your grants, prizes, citations, fame, and whatever comes with it. If they are not, you gonna be just an average very good scientist as most of us. Just be happy with that. While I agree 100% with Irene Adrian-Kalchhauser’s comment, I disagree with the shared working thing. Unless you know very well and has high synergy with the lab mate, things will very likely tend to caos rather than a great deal. But this is just my opinion.