Maternity Leave Rumor Mill

July 6, 2005

This morning when I dropped Sonia off at day care I coincided with Amy, a day care teacher who has been on maternity leave, and Sarah, her six-week old daughter.  Amy already has two children in the day care (one in Sonia's class) and when I first found out that Amy was pregnant my first (selfish) thought was "Oh no, I hope she's not gone when Sonia gets to be her student" since I know Amy is a great teacher and Sonia will be in her class starting this fall. 

But in fact Amy is back at work long before I was after giving birth, because Fermilab's maternity policy is 6 weeks paid leave and you have to take your own vacation days after that.  If you work 1.5 years as a physicist and never take a vacation day you could then get paid for the entire 12 weeks you are allowed to take by the Family Leave Medical Act.  But if you're a day care teacher it's a lot harder--you get fewer vacation days than physicists in the first place!  If you're a parent it's even harder to rack up the extra 30 vacation days, since you have to use up a vacation day every time you stay home with your sick child. 

The truth about maternity leaves in physics (as in the rest of the paid workforce) is that what you get still depends primarily on whom you work for.  When Isaac was born I was a post-doc for the University of Rochester, had a great boss, and I was able to take off 3 months full time and 3 months half-time.  When Sonia was born I was working for Fermilab and hadn't racked up enough vacation days to have three months paid leave, regardless of how supportive my boss at the time was.  I know post-docs at other institutions who only got 6 weeks unpaid leave, in spite of the Family Leave Medical Act! 

But actually, 6 weeks unpaid leave sounds like a party compared to what I recently heard from a friend of mine--she is now leaving the field and suing her ex-boss after she was denied maternity leave and had her salary severely cut after she had a baby.  The University stood by the professor and fired my friend when she complained, and in the meantime the spokespeople of her experiment have given this professor a prestigious appointment in the collaboration. 

I can't believe that in this day and age this can happen, and then I started wondering: for all of us chosen to "speak for the field" and are happy parents doing physics, how many others have left in the meantime because they were treated poorly over precisely this issue? 

Just like there are job offer rumor mills out there where people share gossip about who got what job where, we ought to have a "maternity leave rumor mill" where people can look up how accomodating any one boss or institution might be about maternity leave.  Then we can all enter into these jobs with our eyes wide open, and who knows, maybe the worst offenders of the FMLA might even be punished...   

Comments

[David]

Those stories are horrible! A maternity leave rumour mill website is a good idea. For the record, workers who plan on being parents are much better off in Canada. Mother and father combined can take 89 weeks of leave. The first 52 are paid at 50% normal salary (to a max of $400/week). The second 37 are unpaid leave.

I just finished my 13 weeks of unpaid leave. My wife received 93% of her pay while she took 52 weeks leave - she works for the federal government.

My bosses at Carleton were very understanding and supportive of my leave.

Honestly, 6 weeks maternity leave sounds like something out of the dark ages...

[debbie]

Thanks for writing here, David--you bring up another issue, which is how well employers accept the fact that fathers want to spend time with their new children as well. A friend of mine while working at Fermilab encountered disbelief (followed by refusal) when he asked to work from home one day a week after his son was born!

[Gordon T Watts]

Wow. Amazing.