WASHINGTON – Meredith Clifford leans against a laboratory desk to inspect a plate filled with mice brain cells. She’s a sixth year doctoral student at Georgetown University, where she studies the development of the cerebral cortex. As she leans closer to the table, her perfectly round belly starts to get in the way.
Clifford is four months pregnant—a constant reminder of a looming question about her future: How will she balance family life with her desire to become a professor of neurobiology?
Clifford said she wants to take a few years off to raise her child, but admits, “my career will take several years setback, and might never be as bright as it could possibly be, but for me, it’s a compromise.”
The National Science Foundation and the White House are teaming up to try and find ways to eliminate these setbacks for women like Clifford. The NSF launched a new initiative at the end of September that would increase workplace flexibility for men or women doing grant-funded research.
Grant recipients are now able to defer a grant for up to a year to care for a new child or aging parent. They can also ask the NSF to pay for research technicians to take over for the original recipient while they take care of family matters. NSF spokeswoman Maria Zacharias said the new program would come at no additional cost to the foundation.
First Lady Michelle Obama talked about the importance of finding ways to accommodate family needs at the announcement of the new initiative.
“Our country shouldn’t lose out on its most promising talent because the career path is untenable,” she said. “We have got to do everything we can to keep fueling this country’s engine of innovation and discovery.”
The new initiative is part of a larger White House goal to maintain women in science, technology, engineering and math-related careers—a plan. According to the White House, women currently earn 41 percent of Ph.D.’s in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) fields, but only make up 28 percent of tenure-track faculty in those fields.
Yet some female scientists say the new development can’t curb the never-ending struggle between balancing a demanding career in the sciences with a family life. Wardah Athar, a junior at Georgetown, said she appreciates the effort by the NSF but it won’t make much of an impact.
“It’s such a rapidly changing field that if you’re going to be gone for a year, you’re going to be behind when you get back, I think it’s a great idea, and I think it will help a lot but I think it’s not going to be a solution,” she said.
Clifford said she hoped the NSF plan would inspire others to create similar programs. As of now, the NSF plan only applies to those who are linked to their grants. Since Clifford works in neurobiology, she said it would be more helpful to her if centers like the National Institute of Health or actual universities would create similar plans.
In the meantime, Clifford said she would continue to think of the best way to excel at both her family and science life.
“My way of balancing is maybe doing more of a temporal balance,” Clifford said. “I’m not gonna balance both at the same time, I’m going to balance them over the course of my life—it seems to work for me right now, but we’ll see how it goes.”