Breastfeeding and the motherhood tax in academia

I am writing publicly, for the first time, about my experience as a nursing mother and early-career academic, in order to shed light on issues that negatively impact mothers in my profession and to invite discussion on how to best address these issues. I have two children, aged one and three, and I am in my third year as an assistant professor in a computer science department, a discipline with a well-known gender imbalance. I love my job, I aim to maximize time with my family, and I truly believe that my institution has strived to support faculty with families. My institution’s commitment to family-friendly policies, along with my incredibly generous support network, seemed powerful enough to remove the obstacles faced by many working mothers. But by choosing to breastfeed my children, I set myself up for an uphill battle against policies and traditions that fail to recognize several critical barriers to the successful career progression of nursing mothers.

Discovering flaws in well-intentioned institutional policies persuaded me to seek alternative forms of support for faculty-parents. To truly provide equal career opportunities and the same expectations for work-life balance among working parents, we need to recognize that a breastfeeding mother and her partner have unequal ability to contribute to caregiving in the early stages of a child’s life, and this all too often leads to long-term, unequal distribution of caregiving responsibilities at home. Parental leave and parental accommodation policies that apply to all parents equally, and only in the first year of a child’s life, result in inequitable impacts on career trajectories. With two simple changes, we can address these structural inequities. First, we need to extend the post-birth time window during which parental leave or modifications to faculty duties can start. Second, we need to provide non-transferable parental leave and “modified duties” to all parents. I will provide specific details about how my life changed and why my productivity plummeted following the births of my children, why breastfeeding plays a pivotal role in setting expectations for caregiving duties among parents, and why I believe these changes can level the playing field for all parents in academia.

Before having children, I didn’t think that sharing caregiving responsibilities with my husband would be difficult, as long as we were both willing to put forth an equal amount of effort. However, our experiences in early parenthood were drastically different. As we awaited the arrival of our first child, my husband and I attended most prenatal appointments together, enrolled in birthing and parenting classes, read books and articles on pregnancy and babies, and naively expected that we would divide up caregiving responsibilities evenly. However, I struggled to adjust to working while dealing with the physical demands of pregnancy. This surprised me, because I was in good shape and had normal, healthy pregnancies. As an undergraduate, I had played on the Czech Republic U19 women’s national soccer team as well as Division I college soccer. In graduate school, I maintained a decent exercise routine and went on to take up running as a hobby, even winning a couple of races. While pregnant, I only engaged in mild exercise, I was often fatigued, and required more breaks for rest and sleep. I made changes to my diet. My immune system was weakened. Illnesses took longer to get over, and were often more difficult to manage, as there was a wide assortment of medications I wasn’t allowed to take while pregnant. Illnesses especially impacted my productivity during my second pregnancy, when I had a toddler at home that seemed to constantly be catching a new bug, a common trend in small children. Meanwhile, my husband’s work was more or less unaffected.

Nonetheless, I was optimistic, and hoped that post-birth, the toll of parenthood would weigh on us equally. It wasn’t until after my first birth that I began to realize the central role of breastfeeding in a baby’s life. Breastfeeding my baby made it impossible for my partner to contribute equally to providing care for our baby, and extremely difficult for me to schedule working hours.

I was determined to breastfeed my babies due to the colossal benefits this would provide for my baby and my family, but I didn’t realize how much this would impact my ability to work or to share caregiving duties with any other person. As recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and the World Health Organization (WHO), I exclusively breastfed both of my children for the first 6 months of their lives, and continued to prioritize breastfeeding as primary source of nutrition until they were one year old. Breastfeeding has numerous benefits for infants. According to the Cleveland Clinic, breastfed babies “have stronger immune systems…fewer colds and respiratory illnesses…lower rates of infant mortality…[and] less hospitalization,” among other benefits. Breastfeeding also helps mothers lose weight, and stimulates their uterus to contract post-birth. Numerous psychological benefits to the mother have also been attributed to breastfeeding. On the other hand, as noted in Scientific American, “not breastfeeding after giving birth seems to put women at higher risk for breast and ovarian cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and many other serious health conditions.” UNICEF has even used national breastfeeding rates at six and 12 months as indicators of how family-friendly a country is. In total, I have over three years’-worth experience in working while breastfeeding, as I breastfed each child until she was at least 18 months old. But during the first nine to 12 months of each child’s life, or 1.5 to 2 years total, the decision to breastfeed led to the inability to set a predictable work schedule.

My unpredictable and severely restricted work schedule was a result of the unpredictable feeding and sleeping schedules of my babies, as well as the time-intensive nature of infant caregiving. Typically, a young baby does not have a predictable feeding (or sleeping) schedule, and needs to be fed “on demand.” Medical experts state that it is “important not to restrict the duration or the frequency of feeds” and lactation experts warn that “feeding schedules…can really reduce [a mother’s] milk production.” In addition, many times that my babies were upset, breastfeeding was the only strategy that would calm them down. Indeed, as Seattle Children’s Hospital puts it, “the most common reason babies cry is because they are hungry.” In the first few months of both of my babies’ lives, I was sometimes breastfeeding every 15 minutes. Other times, an hour, or, if I was very lucky, even two hours, would pass between feedings. I was breastfeeding each child throughout the day, for significant time periods, for almost a year. The end of the exclusive breastfeeding period, when it is recommended that babies eat or drink nothing but breastmilk, is around 6 months, but this point does not mark a dramatic reduction in the amount of breastmilk babies need. Instead, it is when “solid foods” — things like baby cereal and cooked mashed vegetables — are introduced once per day to complement breastfeeding. Only at the nine month mark does the AAP recommend offering “2–3 healthy and nutritious snacks per day,” and finally at one year is it recommended (by the AAP, but not the WHO) that babies transition to solid foods entirely. As my baby rapidly grew and developed in the first year of life, I was gradually able to reduce the amount of time that I was “on call” for feedings, but it was a slow process. Due to the uncertainty about when the next feeding would take place, I had to be physically close to my baby at virtually all times of the day.

My inability to express enough breastmilk while I was away from my children compounded my struggle to keep up with work. Despite trying a variety of pumps, cone sizes, times of day, several visits to lactation consultants, supplements, and lifestyle changes, the average amount of milk I could express into a bottle in one pumping session was about one half to one third of the amount that my baby required for one feeding. Each pumping session took approximately 25 to 30 minutes. For comparison, one breastfeeding session for my baby typically took around 10 minutes. The sheer number of feedings, the unpredictable feeding times, and amount of time spent either breastfeeding or pumping made it extremely difficult to schedule meetings, go places without my baby, or have a daily work schedule (let alone to return to a predictable workout or sleep routine). Work needed to happen around the baby’s needs. I started to schedule regular meetings and work-related events around baby’s naps, which start to settle into a pattern around 4 to 5 months. But even then, the pattern was broken quite often, and threw off my plans for work hours. I was not able to schedule work hours or meetings reliably for over a year.

Breastfeeding my children also forged strong emotional bonds between us, making it all the more difficult for to share caregiving responsibility. Breastfeeding releases oxytocin, the “love hormone”, which “is known to affect mothering behaviour in animals” and “may enhance feelings of affection between mother and child, and promote bonding.” My babies quickly became dependent on me as a source of comfort, as babies tend to nurse for comfort as well as for food, and breastfeeding has been found to act as a powerful pain reliever for babies. My husband and I quickly learned that a majority of the time, breastfeeding a screaming baby would calm her down in a fraction of the time that it took my husband to try every other soothing method in the book. If the baby knew I was nearby, no matter what other caretakers were around and wanted to take care of her, she often wouldn’t stop crying until I picked her up. This was especially true when she was sick, and young children are sick often — most infants under age 1 have up to seven colds in the first year of life. Even when I managed to pump enough milk to leave for work, I often left the house while my baby was screaming for me — not an easy thing to do, and not something that most fathers have to deal with. Learning to accept mother-child separation, which would provide more work opportunities for me, and more caregiving opportunities for my husband, was emotionally difficult and took considerably longer than I expected.

Even in families where mothers breastfeed for a short period of time, the initial breastfeeding period may set the tone for caregiving expectations. The shutdowns following the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic have highlighted the considerable and unequally distributed burden of caregiving — in a webinar on the “gendered dimension of COVID-19” put on by The Global Health Network, it was noted that “the social norms of women’s responsibility for caregiving increase during outbreaks.” In academia, the shutdowns seem to be widening the opportunity gap between mothers and their colleagues. Early studies suggest that since the closures, female researchers’ productivity has decreased significantly and some evidence points to “increased caregiving responsibilities” as the cause. The New York Times recently noted that female faculty have been brought “to the brink” by the COVID disruptions, due primarily to their dramatically increased and largely overlooked caregiving responsibilities for young children. If all parents were allowed and able to share caregiving duties equally, they would not be unequally impacted by global-scale economic disturbances.

Most fathers, and all the fathers that I have talked to about this issue, have had drastically different experiences from mine. A few weeks after the birth of the child, most fathers can set their own work schedule and are gone from home for long stretches (three hours or more) of time. While I debated the costs and benefits of hiring a nanny or sending my children to daycare, many fathers don’t have to make the choice between staying home with their children or leaving them with a stranger or in a facility outside the home. Many of the faculty-fathers I know have a stay-at-home spouse who provides primary care to their children. I don’t know a single faculty-mother who has a stay-at-home spouse. The effects of the differences between academic mothers and fathers are striking — a 2016 study found that among 50 top-ranked departments in the field of economics, adopting a “gender-neutral tenure clock stopping policy,” negatively impacted women and positively impacted men. After the policy adoption, “the probability a man gets tenure in his first job rises by 19 percentage points” whereas the probability that a woman gets tenure “falls by 22 percentage points.”

The fact is that pregnancy, the postpartum period, and breastfeeding are demanding, parenting-related challenges that only impact mothers. Of these experiences, I believe that breastfeeding has not received enough attention in the current debates surrounding childcare and equality in the workplace. I believe that largely because I was breastfeeding, I became the primary care provider for my infant and my husband was demoted to a supportive role in the first year of each of my children’s lives. Every day, it seemed that I fell a little more behind with work, while my husband fell a little more behind in acquiring the caretaking skills necessary to provide care to young children. I had to choose between providing essential care for my child and delivering high-quality work. I chose to concentrate on my child and work as much as I could, with the limited time and energy I had.

My experiences in the first year of each child’s life and the differences I witnessed between myself and professors who were fathers of young children were enough for me to fantasize about quitting. I am extremely lucky to be employed in a position that allows for substantial modifications of duties in the first six months following the birth of a child, and I’ve been fortunate to work in a largely supportive environment. However, I was nowhere near ready to return to my regular duties at six months postpartum, and I was constantly exhausted and overwhelmed, emotional and anxious. The career effects of the this time period are still to be determined.

Recent trends in breastfeeding statistics support the hypothesis that many mothers do not receive adequate support while breastfeeding young children. Only 36% of infants are exclusively breastfeed from ages 0 to 6-months worldwide, and only 25.4% of U.S.-based infants reach this milestone. The trend does not seem to be grounded in a personal choice not to breastfeed, as the breastfeeding initiation rate is high among U.S. women — a 2018 study found an initiation rate range of 87% to 98%. Despite the intention to breastfeed, the CDC has found that only 40% of mothers breastfeed “for as long as they intend to.”

More flexible return-to-work options for nursing mothers would likely alleviate many of the challenges that mothers face when they intend to sustain adequate milk supply for their infants for an entire year. Academic jobs allow for such flexibility. A sensible option is to allow mothers to remain on a flexible, research-based work schedule for an entire academic year, as opposed to just one semester. A year-long teaching release for faculty who assume primary caregiving responsibility for a new child in their family is not unheard of — UC Davis, for example, has adopted this policy. In addition to the year-long teaching release, more flexibility in general would greatly benefit nursing mothers — virtual office hours, online or partly online courses, or part-time work (with appropriate cuts in pay) are all adjustments to consider offering in the academic setting. However, these accommodations do not eliminate the disparity between nursing academic mothers, who often default to the role of primary caregiver for their babies, and those working parents who instead assume a supporting role. To do that, we need to consider how we can encourage equal caregiving responsibility among all faculty parents.

I witnessed a dramatic change in my and my husband’s ability to share caregiving responsibilities in the second year of each of our children’s lives. Around the one-year mark, both babies became much more comfortable spending long stretches of time with people other than me. When she was 18 months old, my husband quit his job in order to become my first daughter’s primary caregiver for about four months, which allowed me to partially offset the significant setback to my productivity in her first year and a half. When my second child was born in my second semester as assistant professor, three days after my first daughter’s second birthday, I reassumed a primary caregiving role. After another year spent breastfeeding and working with an inherently unpredictable work schedule, with significant effort on the part of my husband, my baby began accepting my him as an enjoyable alternative to me. The second year of both children’s lives provided a much better opportunity for my husband to take on primary caregiving responsibility. However, he did not have the structural support to become the primary caregiver. He would have to again quit his job.

We should aim to equalize the consequences of parenthood among working parents in academia. The fairly standard tenure clock extension policies, along with teaching releases in the first year that a faculty member adds a child to their family, are inequitable and inadequate. If more parents, fathers especially, were to take parental leave, they would better understand the demands of baby care and they would likely forge stronger bonds with their children, enabling them to be competent and confident caregivers. But we also need to account for the considerable pressure on working mothers to take on primary caregiving responsibilities for young children, since maternity leave tends to be significantly longer and more culturally acceptable than paternity leave. Would it work, then, to provide equal and non-transferable parental leave to both parents?

My institution’s parental leave policy provides one semester of “faculty modified duties,” essentially meaning no teaching assignments, in the first year that a faculty member welcomes a new child to their home. Thus, a faculty parent can expect to receive up to four months of no teaching post-baby, with additional relief from teaching in the summer or winter break following the semester on “modified duties.” This sounds like equal and non-transferable leave, save for one important caveat. The modified duties must be taken in the first year of the child’s life, making it difficult for partners of breastfeeding mothers to become the primary caregiver for their children while on modified duties. It is unsurprising, therefore, that the previously-mentioned 2016 study found that fathers are more likely to achieve tenure when they take a one-year tenure clock extension — they can simply use much of the time to bolster their research portfolio, instead of assuming the role of primary caregiver for their child or children in the first year of life.

One promising model of equitable, non-transferable paid parental leave is Icleand’s policy. Twenty years ago, Iceland implemented a parental leave policy which allowed both mothers and fathers 3 months of parental leave, with an additional 3 months to be shared among the parents as they see fit. Since then, Iceland has updated its policy to a 5–2–5 model, which allows for 12 months of parental leave, with “5 months for the father and 5 for the mother and then 2 that they can share as they like,” and any leave must be taken within the first two years of a child’s life. The equal paid leave, spaced over two years, allows opportunities for both parents, even if one is breastfeeding, to contribute the same amount of time to becoming a primary caregiver for the child. Year-long paid maternity leaves and a range of paid paternity leave options is already being offered by other countries and several U.S.-based companies in my field. However, paternity leave tends to be much shorter than maternity leave.

Beyond policy changes, we must also consider the effect of workplace culture and the impact of traditional gender roles. Japan serves as a cautionary tale for other nations, and institutions, wishing to provide more equitable policies for working parents. Although Japan has instituted the longest paternity leave policy of any nation, an incredibly low percentage of eligible men take paternity leave. Despite recent efforts to create more family-friendly policies by many companies in my field, women in tech continue to leave their jobs after having children even though they don’t want to, in favor of professions in “friendlier sectors.” We need to ensure that parental leave policies are equally available and practical options for both parents.

To conclude, I pose the following question, which was originally posed by my own father when we were discussing the issues presented in this article: what if it was encouraged and expected that working mothers and working fathers take an equal amount of time off after the birth of a child, during the first two years of the child’s life? I have argued that it is impossible for partners of nursing mothers to make equal contributions to caregiving in the first year of a child’s life due to the primary caregiving role of breastfeeding. However, what if a nursing mother (or any parent) could provide the majority of care to the infant in the first year (or any time period in early childhood), and the father (parenting partner) could then take over in the following year (or equal-length period in early childhood)? Children under age two overwhelmingly engage in solitary play, meaning they “do not get close to or interact with other children” and are therefore not reaping many of the benefits from the group setting that is common in daycare facilities. Beyond even a couple of years, young children demand considerable time and undivided attention from their caretakers. What if, in general, both parents took off an equal amount of time off to provide primary care for their children? We have the capability to implement policies supporting this scenario in academia, where work hours are flexible and we aim to support faculty with families. If both parents were unavailable or only partially available from work for the same period of time, would that level the playing field for career opportunities? Would children, mothers, and fathers alike benefit from the strong bonds formed between children and their fathers in these early years? Would society benefit from these changes in the form of more equal opportunities in the workplace and better balance of responsibilities among partners at home? I assert that indeed it would.

Acknowledgements

I cannot thank Randal Burns enough for his contributions as an editor for this article. I also want to thank Jennifer Lachowiec and Travis Peters for their thoughtful feedback and many discussions on this topic. Thank you to all the family, friends, collaborators, and colleagues who have supported me throughout everything.