A study shows that more than 40 percent of women in STEM are leaving their full-time jobs after childbirth. Here's what I'm doing to change that. Marie McCausland

I will never forget the feeling of watching the clock as I waited for the end of a day-long experiment, just a month after coming back to work from maternity leave. This experiment had no pauses for me to pump. All. Day. Long. I had leaked through my shirt and felt lucky I was wearing a polyester lab coat so it wouldn’t leak through that too. The pain as I waited those last five minutes was excruciating. I found myself clutching my breasts a few times, hoping no one in the lab noticed. As the seconds ticked down and I completed my experiment for the day, I literally ran with my pump down to the lactation center to find sweet relief. The incident is seared into my memory, and it resurfaced yet again when I read a sobering new statistic about moms in STEM: Almost half of U.S. women with full-time jobs in the science, technology, math and engineering fields leave the sector or go part-time after having their first child, according to an 8-year-long study led by Erin Cech, a sociologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. It confirmed what many of us already suspected from our own anecdotal experience, as we have watched so many of our cherished colleagues bow out or scale back: It is time to look at the culture of academia and the status of American women for some answers.

Some of the difficulties for mothers in STEM are the same for many working moms in the U.S: insufficient maternity leave, soaring childcare costs, guilt and misogyny; however, there are some challenges unique to academia which also contribute to this unsettling attrition rate. The U.S. is the only developed country without paid maternity leave for new moms. As a postdoctoral fellow (a position that requires a Ph.D. but is not a faculty or staff position) in Ohio, my university provided me six weeks of maternity leave. In contrast, Ohio law states that puppies cannot be sold until they are eight weeks old. Dogs have more legal recourse for being separated from their pups than a working mother does from her baby in Ohio in 2019. I used to tell myself, before I had my child, “I didn’t get a Ph.D. to be a stay-at-home mom,” but BOY did that sound amazing after I had to go back to work while still wearing an adult diaper, running on just three hours of sleep and messing up every experiment I touched. I actually would look down at my hands and ask them, “Why don’t you work anymore?”

You shouldn't consider yourself a "burden" for requesting maternity leave. Marie McCausland

Adding to the problem of inadequate maternity leave is that many institutions, including my own, do not offer significant financial support for childcare or any onsite childcare. And I am surrounded by dangerous chemicals and infectious agents that make it impossible to bring my son to work without having OSHA (Health and Safety) or child services called on me. Even working from home is incredibly difficult once you have a child. I remember fondly the days when the home was where I got my best writing and data analysis done while sipping coffee in my pajamas. Now, as a mother of an almost 2 year old, every two minutes I’m asked for a snack, to listen to “Baby Shark” or to read a book. While I obviously love to spend time with my son, it is not easy to simultaneously analyze data describing protein localization in an H.I.V.-infected colon while doing the hokey-pokey. Then there is the guilt. Ohhhhhh the guilt. When you are at work, you feel guilty for not being home. I sometimes talk about how flexible my schedule is as a scientist because I know how long my experiments will take, and I can move them around relatively easily. However, the odd and irregular hours make it more difficult for my son to understand why I’m not home. Being a mother in STEM means that sometimes, “Mommy isn’t home right now because she is isolating RNA from a cell line and it takes her 12 hours.”

Then, when you are at home, you feel guilty for not working. This can be especially true in science, where it’s so easy to believe the experiment matters more than you do—even though that is patently false. While discussing the merits of longer maternity leave for graduate students and postdocs, a colleague of mine stated an additional 8 weeks of maternity leave could be “another paper” and was seen as a “burden,” because they could not fill that position while the woman was on maternity leave. I had to remind him that this thought process is exactly why women are dropping out of STEM, and he agreed. When my value as a scientist is seen only in terms of productivity, papers and experiments—as compared to an unmarried man’s productivity, papers and experiments—how will women ever be seen as important and valuable? All of this is especially difficult when the inevitable, unfair and burdensome expectation thrust upon young researchers is for you to sleep in the lab, work 24/7 and “publish or perish.” Combine all of these things with the misogyny that is rampant in science, and it is no wonder that not only mothers but childless women are leaving STEM. I am so happy to be in a lab today with a boss and colleagues who not only respect me but also value my input as a scientist, but that has not always been the case. In the past male superiors and colleagues have told me that I am not good enough, I am worthless, I am useless and I am dramatic. My confidence has been seen as “bitchiness.” I have been told that men have it hard in science, and it’s not JUST hard for women. Science still has that “boys club” feel with very few women finding their way to the top. All this because of the men who commit misogyny—and the men and women who ignore it on their own way to the top.