“Children derail academic careers even in places with good social nets, like Denmark,” social scientist Misha Teplitskiy of the University of Michigan posted recently on X. Teplitskiy was summarizing a study by researchers at the Berlin School of Economics, which considered the effects of parenthood on the career ladder in academia.
By every metric the researchers examined, parents lag behind their childless peers, but mothers are affected far more adversely. The odds of holding university employment, especially for mothers, drop following the birth of a first child. Success in obtaining tenure for mothers drop too, perhaps because both quantity and prestige of publications also tank following the birth of a first child. It turns out that losing approximately 700 hours of sleep over the course of a baby’s first year of life is not conducive to producing many brilliant publications just then.
The numbers don’t lie—not exactly. There is an obvious correlation between having children and the death of what could otherwise have been an uninterrupted, ambitious academic career. In this regard, the Berlin study is an anticlimactic autopsy on a patient whose cause of death was already established. As Fairer Disputations Featured Author Ivana D. Greco recently argued, mothers who want to pursue graduate education or academic careers too often find the hurdles in their way insurmountable. Hostility to motherhood, Greco found, tends to be baked into the way academia functions at every level—and the problems only grow for politically or religiously conservative women. Though accommodating universities do exist, stories of women like Beatrice Scudeler, who began a PhD program only to drop out upon the birth of a child, abound.
In other words, it’s not just that children “derail” established academic careers. Children derail even the possibility of such careers for many women who once aspired to them. While the Berlin study focused on academia, similar studies exist for other career fields. In medicine, for instance, children are the main reason why women leave careers they had worked so hard for:
According to the University of Michigan’s Intern Health Study, almost 40% of women physicians scale back their medical practice, or leave the profession altogether, early in their careers. The primary reason? Family.
For some, the logical conclusion of this research is that women who wish to be mothers ought to not pursue advanced education with an eye to such demanding careers as academia, engineering, medicine, and law. Instead, women should be encouraged to prepare for motherhood, and spots in medical schools and law schools should be reserved for men. Though this anti-feminist view is still quite rare (and illegal under current antidiscrimination law), it does seem to be growing, at least online.
Many more would seem to agree with Greco: even if a woman with a PhD, MD or JD never uses it outside her home or local community, her education has not been wasted. And for the greater number of women who do use their degrees professionally, there is something unique that they bring to the table as individuals and as women—something different than the men in these professions offer. It can be difficult to put a finger on precisely what that something is—although anecdotally, I have seen that students interact with me differently than they do with my fellow academic husband. For instance, while there are exceptions to this trend, students do not generally expect the kind of emotional support that they may seek at times from female professors from their male professors. Most people would love to see more women flourish in these professions, and so they pay attention to the statistics highlighted above with real interest.
Numbers, again, don’t lie—and yet, they also don’t tell the full story. Rather, studies like the Berlin study raise a curious question: How should we measure the success of our professional lives?
Too often, the default measure of professional success lies in quantifiable output and advancement. For academics, this means tenure, promotion, and publications. For doctors, it means successfully completing residency and becoming respected professionals. For lawyers, it means making partner at a firm and being assigned to more prestigious cases. For many other careers, professional success likewise means a steady climb up a ladder of some sort, for the entirety of one’s working years. But in the face of demanding careers and their expectations for ever more hours, mental energy, and emotional energy spent at work, tiny helpless babies teach parents a life lesson that is otherwise easy for many to forget: we live to love, not merely to work.
In other words, measuring the professional success of mothers in particular cannot be separated from considering the joy they find in their children and in their lives as mothers—and this joy is often abundant. It reminds us that our ultimate calling is not to our careers. Yes, it is right and good to pursue excellence at work, and it is good to enjoy our work. But the sense of identity that careers create is mere mist—here today, bound to dissipate at any moment, evaporating especially as we age. Investing in family bonds, on the other hand, builds relationships that last beyond our lifetimes, likely far longer than any academic contribution will.
As economics professor Melissa Kearney responded to the Berlin study on X: “Yeah, I definitely would have had more time & mental energy to write more papers if I didn’t have kids. It’s brutal. Now I’m ‘penalized’ forever with a shorter CV and three amazing human beings I love with all my heart.” Medical doctor and academic Kristin Collier likewise commented: “I was once asked by a female academic leader why there was a 10 yr gap in academic output on my CV. I said that the ‘gap’ was where the most important work of my life happened—having 4 boys in 5 years and then helping to keep them alive. My only regret is not having more children.”
My own story is not dissimilar. In the first fifteen years after getting a PhD in Classics, I published very little, in large part because I was focused on caring for my three children, whom my husband and I homeschool. Then at the fifteen-year mark, I walked away from academia for a three-year period entirely and am only now coming back into the classroom this fall.
And yet, there is a plot twist in these examples. Today, few would call Melissa Kearney or Kristin Collier “derailed” in their respective professional fields. Kearney is a highly regarded economist and professor at the University of Notre Dame, Collier, a Clinical Associate Professor at the University of Michigan Medical School. Both are prolific writers, publishing cutting-edge research in their academic fields and accessible pieces for the wider public. Collier has also been vocal about mentoring future doctors who want to integrate their faith with their work. During my own absence from the college classroom, I have published three books in three years, and a fourth is due out next year.
This raises an important point too many studies ignore: babies grow up. The career trajectory of a woman who quits her demanding career after the birth of her first child might initially look disastrous. But what are these women doing years or even decades later, when their children have grown up? Perhaps, like Kearney and Collier, both their family lives and careers in this later period may flourish. And sometimes their unorthodox trajectory informs the very research questions they pursue.
This kind of ordering of priorities seems beyond the comprehension of researchers who are concerned over parents who step back from demanding careers. The axiomatic assumption behind such studies is often that professional success is the only success worth prioritizing. As a result, the obvious conclusion such studies imply is this: Those who seek professional success (like any sane person should) should postpone having children or maybe opt out of parenthood altogether. In many professional environments, this reasoning shapes the culture so thoroughly that it becomes the norm. Of my undergraduate professors, only one woman had children—and she had both her sons after achieving tenure. My Ph.D. program was similar. Only one woman had children.
Yet the Berlin study raises a legitimate concern beyond those that its authors likely had in mind. In too many fields, there is little flexibility for parents that could allow them to scale back their careers temporarily while children are young. While there was once talk of a “mommy track” for childbearing women in the professions, it’s never been adequately pursued. I’ve personally heard of only one university that allows mothers on the tenure-track to adjust their teaching load (with a corresponding reduction in pay) in order to create a sort of “mommy track” during their children’s younger years.
Even more alarmingly, departure from many careers is often a one-way street. A successful academic woman who leaves her post for a few years to focus on her children may never find another position, except maybe as an adjunct. A doctor, lawyer or architect who walks away from her career for a decade may be considered a “has-been” and never be hired again. To walk away or even merely to scale back for a time in many fields means to risk being labeled “unserious.” So many women who might like to prioritize their kids never do.
Such a decision certainly damages one’s prospects for advancement. But for those of us who make it, it is a decision motivated by a higher love—by the conviction that these few fleeting years spent with our young children really are the best use of our time. If prioritizing that time comes at the cost of one’s professional career, many mothers reason, so be it. Such was my own motivation in leaving academia three years ago.
But babies don’t keep. Children grow up, and this has implications for maternal careers. For many women, when this stage arrives, they desire to rejoin the professional world. What might success or failure look like at such a stage? What is truly striking is the extraordinary professional success of some mothers in the second half of their professional lives, when it comes to productivity metrics such as publishing or teaching.
The output of mothers who leave a career altogether, or scale back significantly before returning to refocus on career often far surpasses the output rates of women who opted out of kids or did not take any time off to be with their children when they were young. The latter career trajectories often look like a gentle steady line, as I have seen anecdotally from serving on tenure and promotion committees. By contrast, Kristin Collier’s trajectory has an obvious dip down, followed by a skyrocketing ascent. An uninformed observer will look upon such a CV with raised eyebrows, seeing only red flags.
But such an observer would be wrong. Mothers who are productive in the later part of their careers are successful, I contend, precisely because of their motherhood, not in spite of it. Those who read the Berlin study or similar research that shows the costs of motherhood should be encouraged to know that there is a bigger and more beautiful story to our lives, personal and professional, than what any study can measure upon the birth of that first potentially tenure-destroying baby.
