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This past summer, my husband and I traveled to visit my family in France.

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As we arrived at the house, everyone was out in the front yard under the beautiful thick

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trees waiting to greet us with the usual French kisses on the cheek, for which my American

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husband had had to practice in advance.

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Sporting our favorite floral apron, my great aunt came forward to welcome us and completely

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unexpectedly went straight towards my stomach, grabbed it with both hands and exclaimed,

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Oh mon dieu, but you have great news to share.

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When is this little one due?

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Now, this would have been a very sweet moment if I in fact had been pregnant and not in

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need of a better diet and more exercise.

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My aunt's faux pas was only the most explicit of many other more tactful attempts by our

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family and friends to ask us about kids that summer.

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We'd gotten married, bought a house, returning 29 and 32 respectively this year.

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Of course, we must be thinking about kids, right?

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Now, I'm a millennial and a feminist, so I'm not going to listen to anyone telling

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me what to do with my body, but we do happen to want kids.

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So ever since this trip, I've been thinking about this nonstop.

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Not should we or should we not have kids, but could we?

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Like if we wanted to and were lucky enough to, could we have kids right now?

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As a current PhD student, I never even thought this could be a possibility.

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I've always thought after kids will happen after the PhD.

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But the more I'm learning about academia and tenure track jobs, the more I'm realizing

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that the after might actually not be the best time to have kids either.

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Heavy teaching loads, constant publishing, frequent relocations, uncertain benefits situation,

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these communicatory work environments would now be a better time.

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Hi, I'm Mathilde Souquet.

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I'm a PhD student at Princeton University in the Department of Art and Archaeology.

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And this is Hurting Cats, a podcast about women in academia.

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With me today are my co-hosts.

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I'm Tori Hoover.

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I'm a dual PhD candidate in English and comparative media at Vanderbilt University.

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Hey, I'm Maya Delmond.

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I'm a PhD candidate in American Studies at the University of Kansas.

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Hi, I'm Saruna Baysboor.

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I'm a PhD candidate in public history at North Carolina State University, as well as the

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executive director of the Duke Center for Jewish Studies.

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These questions about kids in academia are something my co-host Tori is also thinking

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about.

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Right?

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Yeah, absolutely.

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I don't have kids and I'm not sure if or when I will.

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Maya has a 20-month-old baby and Saruna has a 10-year-old.

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And I've been debating children myself.

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Right.

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So questions of motherhood within academia are pertinent for all of us, especially because

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both Maya and Saruna have daughters.

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And so we thought it'd be interesting to hear from this wide range of perspectives.

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Right.

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And so the very first thing I asked about actually was, you know, what were your thoughts

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about this issue more broadly?

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Because I thought it was so great to be able to discuss it with a small group of women.

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And that actually led to a discussion of the importance of community.

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Yeah, I think it's probably not as hard as I think.

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But also, that doesn't mean it's easy by any stretch.

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I think it's doable is the way that I see it.

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And I didn't know that it was.

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And of course, it's so dependent on whether your partner is able to help you with this

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or not and whether the institution itself is really supportive.

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Like I know, Maya, you said that you had maternity leave as a graduate student, which is something

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I didn't even know existed.

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Yeah, I had six weeks of leave as a GTA and six weeks of leave as a, I mean, concurrent

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as a student.

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And I actually didn't know that either until after I had my baby.

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And I was emailing with the graduate advisor in our program who's a staff person.

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And she mentioned to me that I had this leave.

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And luckily, the chair of our department also at that time was a mother.

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And the two of them were so encouraging receiving my frantic emails, sleepless emails that I'm

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sure made no sense.

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But they just took care of it all for me.

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All I had to say was, yes, I want to do this.

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And then I had six more weeks with my kid without having to worry too much about school.

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And I've definitely throughout my career relied on the support of female community.

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Women who are able to give the space for me to fail and then help me and then make that

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better.

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Or women who are able to understand that something might not get done in a specific time period.

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Or women who really value what I do and are willing to give me a voice.

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Sometimes those opportunities don't always seem to materialize in the patriarchal world.

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For me, having friends who are not in academia and staying in touch with a variety of moms

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has helped me keep perspective because everybody's career, everybody's body, everybody's family

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is impacting their experience so much.

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And so to zoom out of the particular issues that I'm having as a grad student and just

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feel solidarity with women in various ways has helped me lessen my doom.

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This is a shout out not just to other moms out there, but also dads and non-traditional

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families as well.

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The one thing I've noticed in academia is people are super supportive of your family.

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The people who your colleagues, when you go abroad or whatever, they want to know what

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they can do.

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Can they bring toys?

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Can they help you out?

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There might be a grandma who can actually watch somebody while you're giving your conference

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paper.

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I mean, people are just pretty encouraging in that way, I think, because a lot of them

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went through it.

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And especially the women, I think, really want to hold up other women knowing how difficult

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this can really be.

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I think I've always considered kids as something where there's never really a good time or

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a bad time for it.

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There's better times and worse times and things you can do for others to support them.

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We also spoke at length about the difficulty of timing, both in terms of kids and in terms

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of career milestones and expectations.

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One of the things that is just implicitly difficult is the biological clock.

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Right?

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I mean, you're always fighting against that and you're always fighting against tenure

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clock.

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There's this book called Mothers in Academia.

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It's by Marie Castaneda and Kirsten Isgro.

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And one of the things that they say is that over 50% of the people getting PhDs are women,

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but 38% of tenured faculty are female.

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Especially when you have doom around the job market or around just encountering a problem

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in my project and feeling low about it and kind of like, what am I doing?

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And then you're like, oh, is it worth it what I'm doing to my daughter or is it worth it

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what I'm putting my family through if this might not even work out?

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I do remember one moment of running a postdoc search in the middle of my maternity leave

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and I had Gabrielle on my hip and I'm on the phone and I'm trying to coordinate this call

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to Germany for an interview and I just lost it entirely.

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My research requires a lot of travel abroad.

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I can be gone for months at a time.

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Most people in my program, the expectation is you're going to be abroad for a year, for

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two years, for three years.

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And this is what I've done so far in the last three years.

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You know, I've been gone for sometimes three or four months at a time.

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This is not something I could do if I had a child now.

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Do I get all my travel out of the way now?

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Or you know, do I just wait until you know, this is all over and the dissertation is submitted?

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This is definitely something that's like a big question mark for me.

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I mean, the experience of traveling with a especially infant or a toddler, I mean, you

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have to think about the pack and play where they're going to sleep.

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You have to think about where they're going to eat.

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You know, you can't really bring a high chair with you.

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And then, you know, you have to think about, well, how many diapers do I bring until, you

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know, when's the first opportunity I'm going to have to get to the store to buy more diapers

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for when I'm there.

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So there's a lot more to pay attention to when you're packing.

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And then, and it gave me a little bit more excitement about my time in the archive too,

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because it was the first time that I had really been away from my daughter all day long.

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And certainly for days in a row, that was the first time that we were really apart.

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And it just woke up that nerdy side of me again in a way that I hadn't been able to

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do because I had been spending, you know, maybe I would get half an hour of work in

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here, and, you know, 45 minutes of grading in on the Canvas app on my phone while she's

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napping or holding her breastfeeding or whatever.

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But to have that whole day where I was deep in my project and deep in my research, it

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was awesome.

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Do we think there is a way to institutionalize this?

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You know, these resources of this support coming from the institution, you know, especially

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when it comes to traveling, you know, if it's, I don't know, extra funding to have a babysitter

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on site or extra funding for an extra plane ticket, you know, extra funding for a bigger

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accommodation once we get wherever you're going or, you know, anything like this, if

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it means your child stays behind with your partner, you know, but needs longer hours

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at daycare, you know, this, I mean, all comes down to money a lot of the time, not always.

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I wonder if there is a way for our institutions, you know, our fields, our whatever to take

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on this burden a little bit.

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Yeah, I actually, I applied for a grant, like one of the kinds of grants where you have

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to detail your expenses and then it goes through whatever office at the university.

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And I actually asked like, is childcare, you know, where's the spot for childcare?

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Do I put that in other?

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And I was told, no, that doesn't, you can't include that.

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We actually convene a monthly seminar in Jewish studies for works in progress.

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And we do offer babysitting for anyone who needs it to come to the seminar.

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And also if they want to attend the dinner afterwards, just because people need to be

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able to attend those things and have time off.

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And even that's not enough, right?

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Like the person who's having to give the paper and things like that, you know, probably needed

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more time to prepare.

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And obviously I can't do anything about that.

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But institutionalizing those things are super, super important.

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I also think it's an argument for having more, more just like lump sum grants where you don't

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have to specify exactly what it's for because we all have different needs and we all need

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more money, you know, for whatever it is.

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And those kind of like refund models just leave you broke for a long time.

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But yeah, I was told, no, the university won't consider childcare as an expense.

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There are probably a lot fewer men who are agonizing about like, what if I'm a dad while

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I'm like, you know, researching stuff.

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Which again, just kind of goes back to that, like to that idea of like the inequities of

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caregiving and everything.

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Like there was a study at Georgia Tech of 10,445, like academics worldwide.

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And women academics were eight times as likely to say that they were the primary caregivers

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in their family, like 30 percent to less than 4 percent.

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It also became clear that issues of reproductive rights were really impacting the way we were

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thinking about motherhood within the academy.

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You know, all these issues are interconnected between, between like your state legislature

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to your institution, to your own like dynamic with your partner.

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You know, right at the beginning of my pregnancy is when the six week ban went into effect

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in Texas and then I remember I was 15 weeks pregnant when the DAWBS oral arguments were

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happening and there was this whole line of questioning in there about 15, 16 weeks gestation

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and I was just listening to it like, wow.

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So I think especially in terms of as a teacher, it was important to me to not be pregnant,

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not be out about my pregnancy until I needed to be because I really value the conversations

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that I'm able to have with my students about the issues that are affecting their day to

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day life politically, historically.

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And some of those conversations are about abortion and I just didn't want to bring my

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own pregnancy into the scene on that.

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So it was a really weird time too.

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I was, I felt really uncomfortable about people, you know, using language like baby just with

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everything going around.

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It's so interesting that the state that we're in, right, the physical state that we're in

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in the US is going to have such an impact on our experience.

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And then beyond that, you know, how much the institution we're at is also going to have

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an impact and what the benefits you can get through your own university and free healthcare

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countries.

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So of course, you know, this enrages me and this is what I think about all the time.

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Should I go back to France to have my kids and then come back?

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Because here, no matter what, I mean, it's going to be an unknown.

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I'm in a state where it's not possible to obtain an abortion.

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And so if something were to go wrong, it would be really difficult to manage this, especially

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in terms of like, oh, you need to be on campus as many days for your teaching and something

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like that.

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The day of the Dab's decision was the day that I had scheduled to get off of my birth

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control because I was like not enjoying the side effects and I went into the health center

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and she was like, you need to get an IUD today because it's going to be like, it's going

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to be a really, really crowded in here for the next couple of weeks.

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And if we can't even be sure that our university is going to take our side or is going to be

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able to take that step to protect us, like this puts us at tremendous physical health

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risk, that other companies are now stepping up to the task and protecting their employees.

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And so I wonder if we should have the same expectations of our institutions.

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I think it's really incumbent on institutions to really support the women who are in their

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spaces.

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I actually in 2014 traveled to Oregon and I had a miscarriage.

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And because of the type of insurance that I carry at Duke, when I went to the emergency

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room, because I wasn't admitted, it was not considered an emergency and they didn't want

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to pay for it.

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So female bodies are being circumscribed both physically in terms of Dab's, but then are

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also being circumscribed through cash flow and lack of access to health care.

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And obviously I am a ridiculously privileged individual, but even me, it was, you know,

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these are things that are inequitable, especially for women in academia.

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We've heard a little bit about what it's like to be a mother in academia, but what's it like

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to have a mom in academia?

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To find out, Serena sat down with her daughter, Gabriella.

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Hi, I'm Gabriella Basemore.

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This is my mom, Serena Basemore.

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Wait, how old are you, Gabriella?

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I'm 10 years old.

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My birthday is October 12th and I was born in 2013.

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And can you tell us what grade you're in?

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I am in fourth grade, but next year I'm going to be in fifth.

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So can you tell us a little bit, tell our listeners about what do you think I do?

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You work at Duke in Jewish studies and I think you write a lot of papers and you bring in

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people to speak for, well, bringing people like the prime minister, well, the old prime

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minister of Israel.

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And you brought in that one author from a book about talking whale, about talking whales.

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And don't you?

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And I have students.

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Oh yeah, you have students.

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And aren't you a student yourself?

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I am a student now.

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You're absolutely right.

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I have gone back for a PhD in public history.

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That's good of you to remember.

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What do you want to be when you grow up?

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Do you know yet?

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Have you thought about it?

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I've thought about it a lot.

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So first one is astronaut because I want to go to the International Space Station with

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one of my best friends.

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Wow.

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Discover life on Mars.

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Okay.

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And the second one is being a paleontologist and finding a whole new different dinosaur

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as a different species.

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Yeah.

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And or I'll be engineer.

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Yeah.

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I'm guessing.

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Definitely need to go to graduate school to be an astronaut or a paleontologist.

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There's some places where you can get an engineering degree from undergrad, which is pretty cool.

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That's cool.

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Yeah.

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But graduate school is a lot more work, right?

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Do you ever want to be a mama someday?

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I do.

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I exactly want.

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But if I get more or less, I'm fine with that.

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I want to have two children and I'm hoping for a boy and a girl.

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But if it's a girl and a girl or a boy and a boy, I'm perfectly fine.

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What do you think? Do you think it would be hard to be like traveling at the International

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Space Station, but also trying to be a mama?

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I think it would be hard.

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But if I'm not an astronaut and I'm a paleontologist, don't they do paleontology around the world?

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I could take my kids sometime if it's in like summer, I could take my kids on summer break

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and bring them to, let's say Asia.

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And why do you think that's possible?

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Have you done that with me?

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I haven't done that with you yet.

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We have not gone to Asia, but we have gone to Europe and...

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Isn't Israel technically in Asia?

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Oh.

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And we've gone to Europe during the summer.

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What's something cool that you've been able to do with mama during when she's working?

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Has there been anything that you're glad about that I work where I do?

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Did you enjoy Israel?

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Yes, I loved it.

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What did you do there?

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I got to see the Dead Sea Scrolls with Professor Breitler.

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Professor Breitler and we also got to go to this museum.

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So do you think you want to go into academia?

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Do you think you want to teach?

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I mean, if you had your PhD in paleontology, would you want to teach other people or what

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would you want to do?

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I mean, you want to go out and be discovering things.

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Yeah, but if that doesn't work out and I should be more of a staying in place person, but

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we can also go and travel.

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I'm thinking if I get a PhD in one of those, I could be a teacher for one of those because

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I sometimes play like these fun little games while I'm taking, okay, no personal information

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while I'm taking a bath.

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Okay.

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And I play these games that I'm teaching.

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Yeah, so I might want to be a teacher.

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Do you think it's hard to be a mama in academics?

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You know, I spend a lot of nights away and I have a lot of weekends where I have to go

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to school.

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Seminars that I, yeah, and I have school and classes.

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So do you think it's harder to be a mama since I, you know, it's hard to be away from you

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a lot of times, but.

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I think it's a little, I think it's hard, but you get to go around like you're at least

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like an hour away.

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You can, you usually get back home before my bedtime.

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I do try to get home.

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Yeah.

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So I love you, Dawn, you come in, give me a kissy.

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So you think it's okay, even though mamas work hard?

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I think you are doing really good and I think that you're okay.

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Definitely.

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Well, Gabriella, thank you so much for agreeing to be on this podcast and we look forward

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to your great discoveries either in space or somewhere in a dig.

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Yeah.

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Somewhere around the world looking for dinosaurs.

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Okay.

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Thank you.

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You're welcome.

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There's a fine balance, right?

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Like this, I'm an over planner and I'm always anticipating the million steps and the logistics

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and the, you know, I'm like counting backwards, like if I have a kid, you know, X year, it

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means that you're before I need to do this and then you're before I need to do this,

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my research, my travel.

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But at the end of the day, like if I were to have a kid now, I would figure it out,

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you know, if we want to have them right now.

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So yeah, I think maybe this is important for us, for our listeners to remember as well

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as our capacity as people, but especially as women, I think to adapt and to make things

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work and to step up to the plate, you know, and if our institutions and our, you know,

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circumstances or legislatures, you know, can support us as we do this year, this is what

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we want and to have those systems in place.

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But we're, you know, our most resourceful entity, I think, in this equation.

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I will tell you, Mathilde, if you are waiting for the perfect time to have baby, it's never

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going to happen.

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And children are extremely unpredictable.

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That's it for today's episode of Herding Cats.

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Our deepest thanks go to the National Humanities Center, specifically to its amazing staff

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that helped facilitate this week, and to our fellow Winter 2024 participants.

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Thank you for making this episode possible.

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Thank you also to everyone who helped contribute testimonies when we asked for them.

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And thanks to you for tuning in.

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No, no, I know.

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Yeah, I know we are.

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I just I didn't mean anything by that.

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No, no, I just was trying to make it sound that way in the verbiage.

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No, no, I wasn't worried about that.

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Yeah, I did not mean to dig it more at all.

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I just more of a staging the story.

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This is such a women in academia conversation too, because a man would be like, and these

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are my guests.

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I'm in charge of the episode.