(Episode 138) Reclaiming Your Research Career After Maternity Leave

Ruth Winden [: 00:00:01

There is a brief mention of pregnancy loss during this podcast from 22 minutes 40 seconds to 23 minutes 11 seconds. If you'd like to access further support and resources, you can find these in the show notes.

Introduction [: 00:00:19

Welcome to the Research Culture Uncovered podcast, where in every episode we explore what is research culture and what should it be. You'll hear thoughts and opinions from a range of contributors to help you change research culture into what you want it to be.

Ruth Winden [: 00:00:41

Welcome to today's episode, "Reclaiming Your Research Career After Maternity Leave". My name is Ruth Winden and I'm the Careers with Research Consultant at the University of Leeds. I'm delighted to be here today with Dr. Elizabeth Faulkner and with Dr. Cathal Rogers. And they are colleagues of mine who've done something really beautiful and we will talk about more their approach to managing, coming back to a research career after having been on maternity leave. And before we go into the detail of the work that they have done, I wanted to give them the chance to introduce themselves. And I'll go straight to you, Elizabeth.

Ruth Winden [: 00:01:21

Welcome.

Elizabeth Faulkner [: 00:01:22

Okay, thanks for having us, Ruth. So I'm Dr. Elizabeth Faulkner. I am a lecturer in law at Keele University, where I joined in 2021. Previously I was a lecturer in contemporary slavery at the Wilberforce Institute up at the University of Hull. So I have three core areas of research: the way that law and policy relates to children, the evolution of modern slavery and human trafficking. And the third area, which is the focus of today's podcast, is around issues of equality, rights and justice within UK HE.

Ruth Winden [: 00:01:54

Thank you, Elizabeth. And what about you, Cathal?

Cathal Rogers [: 00:01:56

Hi. So I'm Cathal Rogers. I'm Research Culture and Assessment Manager at the University of Manchester. So that involves kind of developing and delivering initiatives that promote positive research culture, but also overseeing the university's REF preparations.

Ruth Winden [: 00:02:11

Yeah.

Ruth Winden [: 00:02:11

Thank you. And Elizabeth and Cathal, you're also, you are also parents and you've had extensive experience of going on maternal leave, coming back, parental leave, all these things. And I wanted to ask you, you wrote this article, you did your research and what made it so important to you?

Elizabeth Faulkner [: 00:02:32

I could speak about why this is an important issue for longer than we've got time for today. But for me, from the research perspective, the research systematically maps the support systems that are in place for women returning to research following maternity leave across the UK HE sector. And it shows that there's a disparity policy and practical support for staff. So we know that the pressures of academia, they're well known. We know of gender equality, inequalities in workload, in grants, publication biases, admin duties, pastoral duties. It's extensively well documented. And let's not forget about promotion because in the UK the research explicitly identifies that it takes women 15 years longer than men to achieve full professorships at top UK universities and 8.5 years longer to achieve associate professor status. So labour and rewards in the sector, they are constructed and they remain constructed on gendered lines.

Elizabeth Faulkner [: 00:03:32

And there are negative attitudes towards maternity leave remaining within the UK sector and beyond. And that's documented by the League of European Research Universities in 2020 for example. So why is this project important for me? Well, it's got a mixture of personal and professional factors. So there's a significant body of research that evidences poor and inconsistent levels of support for women returning from maternity leave and that negative impact that it has upon academic career progression. But the changes to address it are virtually non existent. It's not an EDI issue, but it's one of research culture. But it's too often sidelined as something for the Athena Swan team to worry about and that it's that unfairness that agitates and drives my views upon why this is such an important issue for the sector.

Ruth Winden [: 00:04:25

Yeah, thank you for that. So you had a personal experience but you felt compelled to do research and address it on a national level. So Cathal, what did you do? Because I know it's a beautiful article, I've read it twice, it's highlighted everywhere. It's, it really resonates with me. And you put so much effort into doing your research. So how did you go about it? Going from you know, personal unsatisfactory experience to taking this into a national research project in your own time. How did you do that?

Cathal Rogers [: 00:05:00

Great. Thanks Ruth. And I'm, I'm glad you enjoyed the article. That's, that's great to hear. And so, you know, as, as Elizabeth says, we're sort of anecdotally aware that different people had different support at this, this kind of career point. You know, some people we knew were getting, got some funding or access to funding pots. Some people had teaching relief almost as standard, whereas others had absolutely nothing. And it didn't really seem that there was any kind of consistency.

Cathal Rogers [: 00:05:28

Yet, you know, we know that this point in individuals' careers and an individual's kind of personal and kind of personal development and this is a really key point. And a lot of the issues that Elizabeth has mentioned there, you know, we all know about the leaky pipeline and things like that, about gendered promotion and pay gaps and publishing trends, you know, we felt that this was a really crucial career point, so it didn't really feel right that there was such disparity of support at this point between universities. So we wanted to get a kind of a systematic mapping of the current state of support across the whole UK sector. So we did this via Freedom of Information requests to 130 UK universities in November 2022. We wanted to find out - did they have a specific policy for staff returning to research from maternity leave, distinct from the general one that applies to all staff? Did they provide any teaching relief and did they provide any access to funding, so funding pots you could apply to? We also asked the universities to provide us with the policies if they had one, so we could try and collate some of the best practice across the sector because we expected we'd find an uneven picture. We're also interested to see was this kind of just a case of size and of scale? Would it be just the bigger universities, more research intensive universities, where you could expect to have this sort of support, or was it more sort of nuanced and more complicated than that?

Ruth Winden [: 00:06:56

So a mixed picture, I hear you say. And Elizabeth, what did you find?

Elizabeth Faulkner [: 00:07:01

Well, the findings in some ways are unsurprising, but to be honest, I thought they were worse than I expected. So they demonstrate that the vast majority of UK HE institutions haven't even considered the support for researchers returning to their research following maternity leave and that there was a clear issue of inconsistencies both within institutions internally between different faculties, for example, and between different institutions. So we had like a 90% response rate with a small number declining the information. And I think it's quite interesting that several universities referred us to their generic maternity leave policy, noting that this was applicable to all staff, regardless of their job role. But we know that the research trajectory, collaborations, doctoral researchers, postdocs, those relationships are really impacted by maternity leave. So having those generic policies is just simply not good enough. But in terms of like what we found in the hard statistics, I'm going to defer to Cathal for the statistical stuff, if that's okay.

Ruth Winden [: 00:08:15

Absolutely. You come in. Cathal. What, what did you find?

Cathal Rogers [: 00:08:20

The kind of key stats is that 3/4 of the universities had sort of given this no thought, you know, often referred, as Elizabeth says, referred us to the generic policy, which didn't cover anything today with research specifically, you know, it was about your right to return to the same job or your right to come back part time, things like that. But 21 universities did have a policy explicitly for research, that's about 16%. 21 universities had a scheme in place for teaching relief and there was quite a lot of overlap between those who had a policy and those that had teaching relief. But it wasn't quite one to one and it did tend to be more research intensive universities that were able to offer that, that kind of teaching relief as a kind of standard. And 15 universities offered funding opportunities such as seed corn funding or conference attendance. And that was a bit more of a mixed picture. So there was some larger universities, but there's also interestingly some small universities that were able to offer that funding. We also found that quite a few, so 13 universities, didn't have a formal policy, but they did have something like an agreed approach or a local approach in a particular faculty or they were piloting something.

Cathal Rogers [: 00:09:30

So we thought that was really quite interesting and we grouped those together and there was some useful stuff there. But we sort of felt that that didn't necessarily help the staff to know what was on offer. And so one of the kind of recommendations which we'll come to later was to really just kind of codify this, write it down, ideally across the whole university so that people have a bit of clarity on what they can expect. Because this kind of mixed picture within universities, never mind between universities, doesn't really help staff at a particularly stressful time where they've got an awful lot of other things to consider. We found a fairly weak correlation between research intensity and here we used REF FT data from 2021 as a sort of proxy of research intensity and the support offered. So there were some large universities that had kind of really clear support, but likewise there were some very large universities that didn't. And there were some smaller universities that seem to be really quite progressive in this regard, had some really interesting support mechanisms, even though they had less research active staff. So really this just showed us it wasn't just about size and it wasn't just about kind of resources.

Ruth Winden [: 00:10:43

And it's so interesting what a mixed picture it is, isn't it? You know, large institutions, smaller institutions, different faculties. And I'm just fascinated to hear about, you know, the diversity of recommendations that you have, because the beauty of your work is you look so broad and so deep and you found lots of specific things that you can do to address the issues and support women coming back into research from maternity leave.

Elizabeth Faulkner [: 00:11:10

And I wanted to add something to what Cathal just said about the statistics. Absolutely, yeah, if that's okay.

Ruth Winden [: 00:11:17

Yes, please.

Elizabeth Faulkner [: 00:11:18

So what we found from the data is that academics in the sector, they receive extremely varied and inconsistent levels of support upon your return from maternity leave and that varies depending on the institution that you're employed by. So one of the points that we thought was important to comment on is that although it's more likely that you're going to have some support at a research intensive institution, that's not guaranteed. And that there are many universities who employ huge communities of research staff who are often on short term or temporary contracts. We've not mentioned precarity up until this point and they offer no support to those returning from maternity leave on those contracts. So it's this inconsistency, it's problematic, it's concerning. But precarity in employment conditions within the sector, that they contribute to gender inequality within academia. And there's clear research that shows and analyzes the intersection between contractual status and maternity provision which contributes to gender inequality in academia within the context of hierarchical neoliberal academic organization and this masculinized ideal academic.

Ruth Winden [: 00:12:32

Thank you for, for giving us that insight, Elizabeth. And when it comes to the recommendations, I was really pleased to see, you know, there's some very doable things in, in your list of things to do. You know, it's not, yes, of course, some are structural, but also there's some very practical things that institutions can offer. Who wants to start on, on this question? What are your recommendations?

Elizabeth Faulkner [: 00:12:56

I'm going to let Cathal because he'll be much more articulate than me because I think I'd be like, all I've got to say is be better. And I don't think that's necessarily helpful in this context. So I'll let Cathal give the review on that.

Cathal Rogers [: 00:13:11

So yeah, we looked at the policies that were in place and we tried to kind of distill these into themes about the sort of support that might be provided or that was provided to staff that was particularly, you know, we felt would be particularly useful for colleagues at this career stage. We were keenly aware of the financial difficulties in the sector and when we did this in late 2022, things have only got worse in that regard. So we didn't really want to come up with a load of recommendations that were going to cost money because we know that that's not practical at the moment. And also, to be honest, we didn't want to give universities an easy out to say that this can't be a priority right now. So instead we tried to pull things together that universities really could just codify, just write down, put into a formal policy so that staff have clarity, you know, on what they can expect. So we identified five areas in the paper. Kind of very briefly, these are really an explicit recognition and awareness of the challenges at this career stage. Some universities have that in writing.

Cathal Rogers [: 00:14:10

We know this is a difficult time. We know there's lots of things to consider and that can be quite helpful I think for staff to just feel that this isn't just, you know, that they're kind of, it's recognised this is a difficult time and it will impact your research. You know, just having that written down is helpful. The minimum standards of support that colleagues can expect would be really helpful and also shared expectations. So that two way dialogue, you know, what, what can be expected of you as an individual and what can you expect from a manager for the research from the university? Some institutions had research tailored guidance for managers. We thought this was really useful. There's some examples of checklists. You know, you will have a checklist of, you know, if there's been any new staff, make sure you introduce those that we can all, you know, we're all aware of research specific ones.

Cathal Rogers [: 00:14:55

So you know, don't forget to discuss about the PhD students. What are the arrangements for supervision, you know, what about any projects that are ongoing? Where are those up to? Things like that that are research specific to help kind of guide that discussion. It's not all about, you know, what's changed from the university's perspective. It's really being aware of that part of their colleagues, you know, research portfolio. And finally and possibly most importantly, an acknowledgment, a real acknowledgement, of the impact of maternity leave in promotion and other assessment criterias. So again, some had some really nice text around this, how this will be taken into consideration. Not necessarily giving extra, you know, giving extra provision, but just clarity on how that will be taken into consideration in promotion, you know, in REF preparations and things like that. And I expect there'll be some universities that might read this and think - well, we already do all of that! So what we challenge back to them is write it down, you know, just write it down if you do it. We suspect that lots of universities do do many of these things, but not many have it in an accessible format for their colleagues to know and have that clarity when they come to need this.

Ruth Winden [: 00:16:00

I think that's such a good point. So much in universities is, yeah, hidden, you know, you need to know who to talk to or you need to know how different faculties do things and having it very clearly written down that and it is accessible and it gets published and it, it people know that where to find these things, that these things are there are so important. I see that in my work, a career consultant all the time.

Elizabeth Faulkner [: 00:16:24

I mean, it was that last point that. Yes, Elizabeth, really interesting in relation to the acknowledgment of the maternity leave and promotion and assessment criteria, in that it's often not even good enough to just have it written down. And I think this final point is really important for me because some institutions would probably say, well, we recognise the impact of maternity, parental leave, ongoing caring responsibilities in promotion criteria. But my query is: how consistently is that logic applied? How fairly? That's within institutions, but also across the sector. And it's often dependent upon who is in the room. And it's the ineffectiveness of the words on paper that contribute to gender inequalities more broadly. And I think it's that level of actionable recommendations that's really important because it's not just having something written down, because often policies, family friendly policies, can be ineffective.

Ruth Winden [: 00:17:22

As you're listening, I will put the link to the publication, it just came out in September this year, in 2025, in the Journal of Higher Education Policy Management. I'll put that wonderful article into the show notes so you can look it up, read it and go for all these recommendations because they really are so solution focused. That's, I think, why I got so much from the article. We are aware of the issues, but what we can do about them is not so clear. And I think you've given the sector some fantastic interventions, you know, that are doable and practical and, you know, and builds on the good practice that is already there. Absolutely. So you put considerable effort into not only dealing with things in your own careers, but also, you know, raising the issue, doing all that research, analyzing all the responses you got to when you did the Freedom of Information request. It's 2025, things have changed.

Ruth Winden [: 00:18:22

My hope was that you would also say, well, you know, we see some, some changes in the last few years thanks to all the research culture work, but for you both, what is next? And Cathal, I go to you first. What's next in, in your research efforts here?

Cathal Rogers [: 00:18:37

Yeah, exactly as you just said, Ruth, you know, when we started this, the sector looked very different. You know, we know things have changed both for better and for worse. You know, worse in the financial situation. Better, I think, as you say, we're a lot more alive and aware of research culture. It's very high on the agenda. You know, we've got many great podcasts highlighting research culture. And so we've already sent out, actually, the next round of FOI requests, you know, asking very similar questions, because we want to see how has this moved on over the last three years and how really that discussion of research culture, the money that you mention, you know, how has that, you know, the research culture funding, has that shifted the dial? Have things changed? I'd like to think, as you say, that it has.

Cathal Rogers [: 00:19:28

You know, we'd really like to think that we're potentially reaching a tipping point here. And if we can, we can start to demonstrate that more and more universities are taking this into consideration, perhaps trialing some initiatives with that, with that research culture funding, that would be great. Because the way we've tried to do this project and will do going forward, has been on a positive approach. We've not named and shamed any institution. That's not remotely what we're doing this for. What we're trying to do is to sort of celebrate and amplify the good practice that's there. So I think hopefully in a year or two, we'll have an update and we'll be able to show that the sector really has moved on, on this. We're certainly moving in a positive direction, but Elizabeth has a second strand of the project. Would you like to talk about Elizabeth?

Elizabeth Faulkner [: 00:20:14

Yeah. Thanks. So, for me, I think something that's really important is the lived experiences. And as part of that, following the publication of the provisional findings by Times Higher last January, we opened a survey and I've got a survey of responses. I've just simply not had the time to analyse the data as of yet. It's just a capacity issue rather than anything else at this point. But it's also that I want to make sure that I use the survey responses because I've been overwhelmed by the number of people that have shared and responded to it at that point. It's trying to ensure that I do justice to those personal experiences that have been shared, but also that it correlates well with the projects, that it's really a piecemeal evolution of a project.

Elizabeth Faulkner [: 00:21:07

It's gone from a frustration with injustices between institutions to something much bigger than that. And I think the way that it seems to speak to so many different people in. I was at a conference in Leiden last week. I was talking to colleagues from Ireland, colleagues from Australia who've seen the article and were like, it's such a big issue, but why? Why does nobody seem to want to tackle it? So, yeah.

Ruth Winden [: 00:21:37

Yeah, you're a trailblazer couple, that's all I can say. And we're so grateful for it because you are, you know, you used your personal experience not just to, yeah, struggle with it and get frustrated with it, but thinking, hey, you know, this really needs attention and we're doing something about this. .

Elizabeth Faulkner [: 00:21:55

And you can just the next question there with the mention of a couple, haven't you.

Ruth Winden [: 00:22:03

It's obviously also intriguing. You know, you're a couple, you have children, you have both big careers and you still made time for something that was really, really important to you. So how did your collaboration and the co-authoring process work? I'm utterly fascinated by this.

Elizabeth Faulkner [: 00:22:20

I think there's two aspects to this really, in that I'm a traditional academic background, Cathal is professional research support. Like the REF guy essentially is what I refer to his job title. Sorry. But on the other hand, we're also married and share three children. So it's been a real interesting project to collaborate on and it's been, it's for us the first. We've been talking about this for so long. It's been a decade that we've been talking about the issues of maternity leave in UK HE because we, we had our first two, our eldest two daughters whilst I was completing my doctoral research and there was no maternity leave policy. I was advised to take a leave of absence, for example, and I thought that can't be right.

Elizabeth Faulkner [: 00:23:11

So then we looked at different funding bodies, different institutions to see what happened there and that's where this first injustice kind of came from. So that's 2015 and it's really developed since then into a much bigger project. And there are other aspects that for me that are really important that we don't look at in the UK HE context and that relates to, and apologies in advance if this is triggering for anyone, but also relating to fertility issues, the impacts of fertility courses, of medication that you can have, but also of pregnancy loss and what support and infrastructure is there in place for researchers returning following pregnancy loss, which is something we've personally experienced and again, it's something that needs to be considered in this big kaleidoscope project. Almost.

Ruth Winden [: 00:24:06

Yeah. It's a complex topic and people have very different personal situations and experience to bring into this. Absolutely. And Cathal - what about you? How did that collaboration and co-authoring process work for you? Because you're the REF guy, you're the data guy, you know, that's what, what we've been smiling about, you know, you're so complimentary. Not that I'm, not that I'm saying that Elizabeth doesn't do data, but you brought that specific experience and expertise to the project, didn't you, Cathal?

Cathal Rogers [: 00:24:39

Yeah, and I think, you know, it's been really quite kind of good to work through because we've been discussing that neither of us could have done this, certainly not done it as well, on our own, because Elizabeth brought that kind of academic background as well as, not to mention the kind of fire and passion that you've heard, to the project. Whereas I've brought kind of different skills from a sort of research professional background. And so we've been reflecting actually, would people with our different skill sets have met, you know, and is, is that collaboration, you know, are there missed opportunities across universities for that sort of kind of skill set merge to come across? But no, I think it's been, you know, a really good project because we've both brought our own passions to it and shaped it in, in a way that's kind of taken it down both of those things, you know, looking at the issue, but then particular systematic approach and let's look at recommendations, you know, so, so hopefully that's the strength in the project as well. And as I say, it's, it's not something either of us could have done as well on our own.

Ruth Winden [: 00:25:43

It's been such a joy to meet you and to talk to you and also, you know, the, the passion and the drive and we're really grateful for it because you went in and you said this is not good enough, let's do something about it. And this is, you know, how, how we do change research culture for the better. So I can't say, you know, enough thank yous to you and I just want everyone to read this paper and I will put it into the show notes. And let's talk about it, let's discuss solutions and, and I think a lot of people who can feel so isolated at that stage of their careers will be really grateful because it's still so often the case. Oh, it's my problem and it isn't an individual's problem. Yes, the effect it is, but you know, it's a structural issue and it's 2025. It really is time, you know, that we put those more equitable opportunities in academia. And so thank you so much also for your time, your superb preparation and all the other things you've done to make this happen. So thank you so much and do stay in touch because we really want to see the next paper coming out of it and new insights and you keep driving, driving the issues.

Ruth Winden [: 00:26:49

But I really hope also that people will feel inspired and also ready to collaborate and see. Okay, you know, how can we address the issues you've given us some really good materials here to work with. Thank you.

Introduction [: 00:27:04

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