As is the case for many parents in academia, parental leave has played a major part in the trajectories of our lives and scientific careers. We both had children while completing graduate school and postdoctoral positions, and our decisions about when to have children and where to pursue our next academic positions were influenced heavily by the availability of paid parental leave.
For her second child, A.G. was able to take 20 weeks of parental leave. Hers is an excellent example of the patchwork of policies that must be applied in some cases: she used short-term disability, six weeks of paid parental leave, unpaid leave and vacation and sick days.T.G. is also Canadian and had her first child after finishing her PhD in ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Toronto, Canada.
For our database, we focused on around 30 Canadian institutions and 146 US universities classified as R1, or research-intensive, by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. We recorded data on the length of paid parental length across institutions, the academic job , parent type , and whether the institution was public or private.
But people in certain academic stages, such as undergraduate and graduate students, usually do not qualify for this federal leave, because they are not able to accrue enough eligible work hours. It is then up to the individual university to have a policy in place that allows these groups to take paid leave.