Science or Family? CEITEC Seeks for a Way of Combining Private Life and Work for Young Scientists.

26. Nov. 2014

Science or family? This almost Hamlet-like question frequently troubles young scientists, and thus their employers. Scientific work is demanding in terms of time, and often requires travel and long-term placements abroad, which is a big complication for families with young children. In particular for a woman at the start of her scientific work, a long period on maternity leave can kill a successful career. The management of CEITEC however sees young talented scientists as extremely important, and for that reason is interested in establishing and modifying the career system in such a way that the Czech Republic does not lose these people. Answers to the burning question of how employers can support PhD students and postdocs will be sought at the international conference to be held on Thursday November 27 on the theme “Young Scientists: Balancing Career and Family”.

The textbook examples of this contemporary problem, which not only modern research centres like CEITEC are dealing with, are primarily young women scientists who on finishing their PhD studies cease being scientists, and in the better cases leave for administrative positions in their field. This is the result of the difficulty of combining work and family life. “We want to find a systematic solution and a means of implementing it, because we cannot allow Czech science to lose these people,” emphasised Eliška Pudová, who organised the conference. Despite the numbers of men and women undertaking PhD studies being more or less the same, progressively, as we look at higher and higher positions in science, the proportion of women gets steadily smaller. Both Czech and foreign experts will, within this international conference, respond to the question of why women leave science, and how to deal with this issue.

One of the topics of the conference will be young men and their families. “A typical example would be a thirty-five-year-old scientist, who, to carry out his project has to spend six months in a foreign scientific institution. However he has a wife and small child,” said Pudová describing the typical situation.

A subject of discussion will also be the length of maternity leave. “If a woman working in science spends three years on maternity leave, it is highly unlikely that she will be able to return to her place in the system and carry on from where she left off,” said Pudová, pointing to a further pitfall. In the space of three years, science and research move on in such a significant fashion that it is often impossible to catch up. On top of this, international cooperation, travel and irregular working hours, together with experiments for example that carry on overnight, mean that being a mother complicates the position of women scientists in a fundamental way.

In 2012 women accounted for only 27.4% of researchers working in Czech science. While since 2001 the proportion of women amongst master’s and PhD students and graduates has grown, this has not influenced the proportion of women amongst researchers. The share of women amongst master’s degree students in 2012 was 60.4% (an increase of 12.3% against 2001). The proportion of women amongst PhD students in 2012 was 44.0% (an increase of 7.6% against 2001). In contrast the proportion of women amongst researchers in 2012 was a mere 27.4%, which is 1.4% less than in 2001.

CEITEC has currently around 10% women among the heads of research groups, and is prepared to work systematically on increasing this figure. Aside from holding this conference it applied this year in October for an EU grant for activities aimed at supporting equal opportunities in the scientific environment.