A couple of weeks ago I got this email from a faithful reader. She writes:
Hello,
I'm passing on this wonderful news about a change in NSF's Earth Science postdoc policy on parental leave. I have not seen this in other NSF postdoc announcements and had to negotiate my own situation of unpaid leave in an ad-hoc way (there was no explicit policy) that included no paid leave apart from accrued sick/vacation time. And how much accrued leave is a postdoc really going to have, anyways? This new announcement allows up to 2 months of paid leave from the award for parents upon birth or adoption of a child. Fantastic news, but I believe NIH has had a leave policy for a lot longer, Isis? Hopefully this will begin to extend to other NSF and federally funded postdocs. If you'd like to post on your blogs that would be great and would hopefully raise the issue of institutional support. Although I am emailing from my faculty account, please keep me anonymous on the blog.
I took a full 12 weeks of leave on my postdoc, made possible only because my husband went back to work after staying with us for a bit over a week, I was paid for a few weeks of that time, after which I was hit with the cruel reality of not only no paycheck, but sending in my premiums for benefits. Overall, it was worth it - how could it not be? Maybe this is why we're continuously stuck with these crappy situations, because it's always worth it. At the same time, I will likely wait longer to try to have a second child because of the money spent/unearned and the move to my current institution where parental leave depends on accrued sick/vacation time that I will need to begin hoarding again.
Thanks for all of your great work on creating a community for women scientists and our concerns.
[Anonymous faculty member]
AFM is correct. NIH policy NOT-OD-08-064 stipulates that recipients of NRSA-level awards may receive up to 60 calendar days paid parental leave for the birth or adoption of a child and either parent (mother or father) is eligible to take the leave.
Considering the relative employment limbo that most postdocs live in, I think these are important policies. What I wonder about is, what happens to folks who are not necessary supported by an NIH/NSF Earth Science stipend?
AFM nails it with her comment about the need for institutional support and, more specifically, policies allowing paid leave regardless of funding source. Hopefully this will not only begin to be a policy adopted by universities and other funding agencies, but the importance and availability of these leave policies will be communicated to faculty and trainees.
After all, what good is a leave policy no one knows about? Until then, start making babies, NSF Earth Science Fellows!
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A parental leave for people of reproductive age?
Why? This clarifies the situation! Why would a government agency DO that? Don't they know we want to wander helpless through the morass of 8 pt font, trying to figure out what they mean?
Next thing you know we will have clear grant instructions, and the reviews will deal with science, not subjective minutiae.
Can the end be far away?
Posted by: Pascale | November 9, 2009 8:10 AM
Thanks so much for posting the info on the NRSA leave policy. I am a (female) postdoc hoping to start a family soon. Getting an NRSA meant that I lost my subsidized health insurance + ability to contribute tax-free to my 401k at my university. I am glad to hear that the leave policy has been extended to 8 weeks - 4 weeks seemed really short.
Posted by: Anonymous | November 9, 2009 9:21 AM
The NIH Policy is:
'Trainees and fellows may receive stipends for up to 60 calendar days (equivalent to 8 work weeks) of parental leave per year for the adoption or the birth of a child when those in comparable training positions at the grantee organization have access to this level of paid leave for this purpose.'
It is NOT as simple as NIH says 60 days, and that's how it goes. If your institution doesn't support paid maternity leave to this level for everyone in the same position- then my reading of that rule is you can take up to what your institution will support.
At my institution this is your accrued vacation and sick leave, there is no 'maternity' or 'parental' leave policy.
Posted by: drdrA | November 9, 2009 9:31 AM
It would be amazing if institutions would actually support paid parental leave for postdocs. My MRU does not, and I only had ~5 weeks of accrued sick leave (of course, postdocs don't get vacation so I couldn't add that in). It was only because I have an amazing advisor that I was able to "work from home" and remain on the payroll when my daughter was born.
Posted by: Jenny | November 9, 2009 11:04 AM
Ditta what drdrA said. NIH will pay for (up to a limit) whatever the institution deems is parental leave, which at my institution is essentially nada. 12 weeks unpaid FMLA leave, or take your vacation/sick time. I was lucky to be an 'endless' postdoc/research faculty, in that I'd accrued lots of leave time (took 8 weeks). But it's not just unfair treatment of postdocs, the tenure track faculty don't get paid parental leave either, they use their accrued leave like I did. For some postdocs, even if you stay somewhere longer term, if you bounce around funding sources and technically be employed by different entities, you can lose any accrued leave every couple of years anyway, despite keeping the same job!
Posted by: Neurowoman | November 9, 2009 11:37 AM
drdrA and Neurowoman are both right, hence my comment about the need for universities to universally adopt these policies.
That said, I have been fortunate/unfortunate in my career --I have been unfortunate, I suppose, in that I have never been at a university that allowed trainees any kind of formal leave. I have been fortunate though that the places I have been have always seemed to default to the NIH policies about things.
Posted by: Isis the Scientist | November 9, 2009 12:05 PM
Neurowoman is exactly right. I shared my experience on the birth of my first daughter as a 4th-year postdoc on drdrA's blog a couple months ago, but it seems relevant here as well. I had been paid from my advisor’s grant for a year, then had won an individual NRSA fellowship for two years; several months before my daughter was born, the fellowship concluded and I was again paid from my advisor’s grant. At this change in status, I was considered to be a “new hire” by the university (and lost accumulated sick and vacation days), despite the fact that I had worked full time and continuously in one lab for over three years. At the time I needed maternity leave, I was formally within a 6-month new-hire probationary period, ineligible even for FMLA. I had had only 3 months since coming off my fellowship in which to accumulate sick and vacation days. I was completely at the mercy of whatever my advisor was willing to offer. Fortunately, he let me have 6 weeks with pay, by letting me "work from home", but still I was unhappy as I would have been able to take 3-4 months with pay, and without having to beg, had my sick and vacation accumulated continuously while on fellowship. We could definitely use some standardized policies and they should not penalize those who win fellowships.
Posted by: crystaldoc | November 9, 2009 1:26 PM
I get a week
Posted by: anon | November 9, 2009 4:26 PM
Why do people want to work in the states? We have 480 days of parental leave which can be shared between the parents. During this time we get 80% of the salary.
Posted by: Geologist | November 9, 2009 4:59 PM
This is amazing... I didn't realize how very very lucky I was. I had my daughter in graduate school, when I was supported by a training grant. There was no parental leave policy and apparently no precedent. No one could figure out who should decide how much time I could take (my advisor? someone in HR? the local administrator of the training grant? someone at the funding institution?). I ended up taking 14 weeks, as agreed upon with my advisor. I kept getting paid the whole time, kind of by default.
Re: comment #8: how could you possibly go back to work after a week? I had a c-section and was still on pretty heavy pain meds a week later...
Posted by: lynne | November 9, 2009 5:27 PM
Thanks for posting this, Dr. Isis. I just returned from a conference where a friend who is on a postdoc in the EU will have up to one year and 75% pay after the birth of her child and it is always interesting to hear the response to EU folks to our leave policies. We can only hope that our institutions will follow the lead of federal agencies in adopting these policies.
Posted by: AFM | November 10, 2009 10:01 AM