The parenting penalties faced by scientist mothers

Image credit: Veronica Cerri. Article by Kendall Powell. Nature – July 20, 2021.

Starting a family at a key career stage comes at a cost to birthing parents — and many end up leaving the profession as a result.

Yhasmin Moura’s research was not the only thing on her mind in 2017 when she was considering postdoctoral positions in the United Kingdom and her home nation of Brazil. Moura was pregnant at the time, so parental-leave policies were a top concern.

Even though it meant moving far away from her extended family, Moura chose a placement at Lancaster University, UK, largely because it offered a full year of paid maternity leave. The Brazil placement would have given her only four months of unpaid maternity leave. “The pregnancy defined my position and determined a completely different future for me,” says Moura, a geographer and remote-sensing researcher who is now a postdoc at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany. […]

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