Toby Kiers’ guest essay in the NYT (4/26/24) titled “A Simple Act of Defiance Can Improve Science for Women” describes taking her children to various parts of Africa to do her ecological fieldwork as 'radical feminism’, a response to the “science career vs family” battle waged by female scientists in the US. It is a well written essay describing the challenges and great benefits of taking children into the field, and she presents doing this as “an act of academic defiance” and a “form of rebellion”.
While I appreciate the sentiment and understand that this is perhaps less common in the biological sciences than in other field-based research disciplines, I was surprised to see
this description presented as edgy, avant-garde, and, frankly, new. Perhaps I have been lucky in my experiences, but much of my ‘luck’ is based on the work of the women and men who came a generation (or two) ahead of me.
One of my first field experiences as a graduate student was a month-long excavation in Spain, where the project director and his wife (also an archaeologist) brought their two school-aged kids. While the kids didn’t excavate, they were incorporated into the daily rhythm of fieldwork. It was fun being in a multi-generational setting, and important to see my professor balance the demands of fieldwork with having a family in a way that seemed – from the outside – natural and seamless.
My first field project as a mother, I co-directed excavations with a Spanish colleague who was also a mother. My son was almost 2 years old at the time, hers were 3 and 5. While we both have supportive partners, they had their own professional commitments, so we planned our project to meet our children’s needs as well as our scientific ones. I stayed in a large fieldhouse with my son, partner, and graduate and undergraduate students, while she stayed at her mother-in-law’s house. In the mornings, the students and I would drop my son off at a local daycare, pick up the co-director from her in-laws who were taking care of her sons, and drive to the excavation site.
Those drives became great bonding times for us. We’d spend the first few minutes unloading about family dynamics, sleep issues, and other ‘momma-talk’, then switch gears to plan the day’s excavation goals and work targets. Our work schedule was based on childcare availability. We started later in the morning than we likely would have otherwise and we had to be back by late afternoon for pick up, all based on daycare opening hours. The excavation was a great success, I never heard complaints from the students, and my colleague and I survived largely intact.
It was a challenge for her to be with her in-laws for a month; I pretty much collapsed of fatigue after running a project with several participants, all while having my family dynamics and new mother insecurities on public display. After that experience I had a greater appreciation for how difficult it was for my former professor and his wife to be ‘on display’ with their kids for a
month.
When my daughter was born, I decided that I would limit my fieldwork time to 3 weeks. We didn’t have the financial resources to pay for multiple airfares, and I didn’t want to be gone for longer than 2-3 weeks at a time. Many archaeological projects are multi-month affairs – you ‘go to the field’ for the summer, a time, by the way, when you are not being paid by the university. Most faculty positions are year-long positions with 9-month pay. The benefit of this system is that you do not have general university obligations in the summer: you don’t need to teach summer classes, attend meetings, and you have a lot of flexibility. However, particularly in field-based disciplines, you need this time to do your research and writing, so you end up doing precisely the work required for tenure and promotion during the time when you are not being paid. Funding agencies do not typically allow archaeologists to add summer salary to research grants. So that means any out of pocket expenses are yours to carry. Luckily these days, some private foundations include opportunities to request childcare costs, however the US federal grants do not. This is not the case in Europe, where many countries may provide funding for childcare in grant proposals.
I was frankly nervous about limiting my fieldwork time to 3 weeks. I had been on and observed many projects that were much longer and I wondered if this would somehow impact perceptions of my rigor, dedication, or seriousness as a field archaeologist.
What I’ve found, however, is the exact opposite. Having shorter field seasons has allowed me to work closely with my colleagues and really define our goals, be strategic in our work, and between these shorter field seasons be able to work up data that then informs the next season or project. I learned that there is no ‘one size fits all’ when it comes to fieldwork. Also, I collaborate closely with my colleagues in Spain and Croatia, and this approach has allowed for greater dialogue and flexibility accommodating their personal and professional needs too.
When the kids were in elementary school, we did a longer project in Croatia and brought both of them. Logistically it was a bit challenging, but we found a fieldhouse that consisted of separate apartments for some family privacy and a babysitter to watch the kids for several hours a day so they wouldn’t just be ‘underfoot’. One graduate student’s partner also came on the project. Although not an archaeologist, we had the space in an apartment anyway, and he kindly would go out and get lunch for us on most days. More importantly, the graduate student could spend time with her partner. Since the early days in Spain, I’ve felt strongly that I wanted to promote family-friendly projects. Our most recent project last September also had two participants' non-archaeologist partners and one participant's child, who all came to work with us for a few days.
It is much easier to figure out ways to balance the demands of your career and parenthood when you call the shots.
Parenthood is a wild ride – the needs and demands of your kids change through time. A teenager’s needs can be more emotionally demanding versus the physical demands of an infant. So clearly the way you organize and run a field project needs to evolve through time. Now that my kids are teenagers, I prefer to do fieldwork while they are in school, keeping them in their normal rhythm, and be home for their summer breaks that are filled with a combination of camps, summer jobs, and more unstructured family time. I use that time for writing research reports, articles, and proposals.
Parenthood in Academia
Other arenas of ‘academic defiance’ were forged by colleagues at different institutions. As a scientist and mother, first at the University of Oregon, then at Penn State, and now UC Santa Barbara, I benefitted from department norms that were already very family friendly. In each of these departments, several (most) faculty had kids, including senior female faculty. I took it for granted that faculty meetings and colloquia were held during regular K-12 school hours, that kids were welcome in the department on all those innumerable (and seemingly always surprising and random!) ‘in service’ days or, in the case of Penn State, snow days when the schools would close but campus remained open. My partner and I both lectured on occasion with an infant in a front pack, and I have wonderful memories of my elementary-school aged son helping distribute materials and handouts in classes on snow days. Kids were and are welcome at department events. When we started hosting those events ourselves, I tried to make sure that there were toys or crafts available for the kids.
Is all of this radical?
Yes, I suppose it is and I know from others that this is not the norm throughout the country.
Is it new?
No. While I would like to think of myself as rebellious, I was privileged to be in departments where women and men had previously pushed for improved, more family-friendly conditions.
Is it enough?
Most certainly not. While we have many opportunities in academia to define our work environments, there are clearly larger structural issues that need to be addressed. Family leave policies are still woefully inadequate in many institutions; availability of high quality and affordable childcare is practically non-existent; providing safe and fun afterschool spaces to help families and kids foster healthy relationships is largely lacking; and the list goes on.
Much work still needs to be done on this and other fronts and we need all the rebellious, defiant, and radical feminists in academia we can get to move the needle for the next generation of scientists.
