Are academia and motherhood incompatible?

Some points I noticed: the authot speaking about the sciences seemed much less negative than the three authors from a humanities background. I'm not necessarily offering a reason - the final author was talking about second hand experiences, vs the first hand experiences of the other authors, and other explainilations could be differing attitudes to the same discrimination between humanities and arts practitioners. Our out could be that the sciences have more resources, jobs are less scarce, and tend to be less insecure (not secure, not not quite as bad. E.g. almost all science postdocs are for three years). The second thing I noticed was that Elizabeth Faulkner noted that of the 21 universities that reported having return to work policies, 10 were Russell Group, saying this showed the problem was across the sector and not related to resources. But 10 Russell Group universities is nearly 50% of such institutions, where as the fraction is way lower for not Russell Group.

Hi Ian, A fair comment, and thanks for engaging with the piece. You are right that proportionally more Russell Group unis have a policy (10/24) compared for the rest of the sector. Our point, perhaps lost in the brevity of needing to stick to a tight work count here, is that it is not JUST a case of resources and that bigger automatically means having a policy and smaller does not. In our longer analysis we further look at teaching relief and ring fenced pots of funding and a similarly patchy picture emerges. Thanks, Cathal Rogers