For women in academia, barriers to having children aren't just finding partners or preserving fertility.
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For women in academia, barriers to having children aren't just finding partners or preserving fertility. It's systemic barriers—relentless relocations, temporary contracts, focus on individual achievement—planning for a family is like an impossible luxury.
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@amydiehl I disapprove of the cisnormative language of the article. Eggs or sperm don't imply gender and as a trans man I face the same situation. The expectation, that trans men are not supposed to consider pregnancies comes on top of this.
However even the cis hetero male colleques I'm close enough with to talk about this have this problem. They would like to have a family one day, but they feel that it would be incompatible with the life they currently have unless they find a girlfriend who is willing to sacrifice her life entirely to move from one location to another with them again and again. They think that this wouldn't be fair to the potential girlfriend. Furthermore their careers don't allow them to have a social life outside of their science bouble and that makes finding a partner difficult. There are not that many women at our conferences and the few that are there are mostly people they already know. 1/*
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@amydiehl just gonna add to this, that these practices fuck over disabled people and people with chronic illness as well in many cases. I cannot pursue an academic career beyond postdoc because I cannot afford or get proper healthcare in most countries outside Germany - or in the rare cases where I can, the bureaucracy is not worth it for a short time period. This automatically kills any chances for professorship in Germany.
I'm lucky that's not my goal at all. But still. I don't relocate for a mediocre paying job without security. Especially not to the US, and especially not from next year onward.
