Research Assistance for Mothers Returning to Work (2003)

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Research Assistance for Mothers Returning to Work

Opinion piece by Sex Discrimination Commissioner Pru Goward. Published in The Australian – Higher Education Supplement, 11 June 2003

In the space of six months two of Australia’s more competitive universities have offered special research grants to female academics returning to work from maternity leave. The University of New South Wales is now offering $10,000 in research funds while Monash University’s Science faculty decided earlier this year to offer $15,000 to academics who agree to return to the laboratory. This is in addition to paid maternity leave of twelve weeks at full pay already available to academics in Australian universities, courtesy of university funds.

Universities do not have enough money to be politically correct. Whatever they do, you can be sure there will be a bottom-line benefit.

Overwhelmingly, the benefit for universities has to be the retention of staff and of their intellectual capital. Major banks estimate it costs them $80,000 every time they lose a teller, law firms estimate the costs to them are in the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars; for academics, the loss will also be significant.

The loss is in two parts. Paying an academic her twelve weeks maternity leave may provide some insurance against that woman leaving the university, but it provides no guarantee that she will recommence her research activities upon her return. Contribution to the world’s store of knowledge remains the raison-d’etre of universities everywhere. For that reason, paid maternity leave is not enough.

Both universities have publicly acknowledged the research disadvantage created by taking that year out to have a baby. It is not as if academics can return to work and immediately start on a new research project. Research projects need funding and applying takes time. Successful applicants need continuous track records. A year away can mean much longer sitting around while grant applications wander through the Byzantine mazes of Australia’s multifarious funding bodies. While academics wait for the application raffles to be drawn, they are instead drawing salaries from university funds.

But it is more than that. Driven, talented people do not like sitting around waiting to recommence their chosen work. If the broken research records of women academics disadvantage them when applying for grants, universities believe they tend to give up and concentrate on teaching instead. The result in the competitive world of academia, is Sudden Stagnation. No research, no promotion.

The latest Bureau of Statistics figures bear this out. Only sixteen percent of academics above the senior lecturer level are female, compared with the below-lecturers who are more likely to be women than men.

It could be argued that the poor showing in the most senior ranks will be corrected over time as that majority of female students move into post graduate work and up the academic ladder. The current 47:53 below-lecturer ratio in favour of females also suggests the correction has begun.

But the truth is it is not happening. Women have outnumbered men in higher education for about twenty years but are only slightly more likely to become an associate professor or above than they were a decade ago ( 9.1% in 1990 compared with 16% in 2000). The big drop happens between lecturer and senior lecturer; 44.1% of lecturers are women but only 29.4% of senior lecturers. Precisely when research records start to count and child bearing begins.

So assuming women are as able as men to conduct high level research, their failure to do so during the early years of motherhood represents a loss of intellectual capital not just for them, or the institution that nurtured and trained them in hope of academic glory, but for the nation. Australia is not big enough to compete with the rest of the world with one half of its research effort tied behind the back of a maternity gown.

The introduction of Populate and Publish style research programmes for women might also give those universities the competitive edge over institutions without these incentives. In faculties where there are more women than men graduates, this can be an important part of the quality game.

For women, these research grants are special measures designed to compensate them for the professional disadvantage that flows from maternity. For universities they are a means of retaining their investment and assisting in ensuring the most meritorious rise to the top. Let us not be carried away however; $10,000 or even $15,000 is well below the average science research grant.

If the universities wished to be really politically correct and even further out in front, they might consider extending the scheme to fathers who take a year off to care for their families also. Fair’s fair, after all.