I have had some recent thoughts about how we support women in the sector during pregnancy, mat leave and particularly the first year after returning. (Sparked by discussions around the @FranklinWomen carers scholarship and my chat with @doctormcdougall) https://twitter.com/nkserwas/status/1278350938508423168

Now I’m hesitant to tweet this but I’m gonna put myself out there because I want to pave the way to change rather than expecting future women to have to go through hell to preserve both their families and careers. If you don’t have anything constructive to add, kindly scroll on.

This post by @NKSerwas made me smile - an amazing mentor to recognise that a technician makes all the difference. When teaching academics take leave, someone takes over their teaching. But this replacement seldom happens for research. And loss of momentum can be a kiss of death.

I was fortunate to be supported by @MolHorizons and @ihmri to get support while I was off with my son. @NeuralOoi was a star in making sure I had the *right* help. Super grateful for all the people who made this happen for me. Especially @van__Oijen who was an absolute champion.

Other ways to improve equity other than providing personnel include relieving newly-minted research parents from jobs that are peripheral to their research. This means alleviating them of administration and teaching wherever possible:

A very short period of time is “allowed” for a researcher to bounce back after career disruption, where momentum is lost and the effort to get things going again is huge (in addition to raising a child under the age of 1, a very demanding time, not sleeping, hippocampus fried)

Offering new parents time to scientifically recover, in my opinion, is the most valuable form of support that can be given. This benefits the individual, and also the institution long-term.

. @FranklinWomen recently surveyed a subset of its members to see what support would be most helpful for carers during the pandemic. The two clearest outcomes: help with household chores (cleaning, food prep) and coaching to provide external mentorship. THESE ARE NOT BIG REQUESTS.

This highlighted to me is that it may not actually take *that* much to support parents with new children and retain women in science- could it be as simple as a few coaching sessions and food vouchers? No data, but I *do* know acknowledgement of the hardships helps immensely.

Now I‘m sure there are naysayers reading this who say “why should these people get special treatment.” So let me tell you a story about Aesop’s Fox and the Stork (closest emoji)

A stork and fox met and became friends. The fox invited the stork over for dinner and served milk in shallow bowls. The fox lapped up her milk up happily but the stork with it’s long beak couldn’t drink any milk from the bowl.

The next day, the stork invited the fox for dinner. Stork served them both milk in long fluted glasses. Stork easily put his narrow beak in the tall glass and drank but fox couldn’t get her snout inside and couldn’t drink any.

In order to be able to enjoy the milk, the fox and the stork each needed to be served the milk in different vessels. It isn’t fair to simply treat them as if they were the same, when they clearly have quite different needs.

Let me tell you that starting a lab while having a baby has been some next level shit. These have without a doubt been the hardest years of my life, and very few will truly understand the struggles unless you are a woman who has lived experience.

But just because this is not *your* experience, it doesn’t mean it’s not valid or that you can’t put yourself in these shoes and try to understand why expecting a new mother to drink through the glass flute when she has a small snout will *never* work.

If we are actually serious about retaining talented women in science, these are some of the things from my observations (I think small things) that can be done to keep them here. Recognise they have different needs, and work to make those needs met.

The payoff is improved diversity and retention of some of the sector’s most precious talent -which benefits everyone END