Barbara Biasi

I was a third-year PhD student the first time I heard the advice: if you want to be successful in academia, children should come after tenure.

For me, that was not a real option. I started my tenure-track job at 30, at a place with a nine-year tenure clock. So, terrified as I was, I jumped. I had my first child at the end of my second year as an assistant professor. My second was born 22 months later, and my third a little less than three years after that.

As these choices reveal, I love being a mom. This may certainly be because I have been lucky. Apart from nine months of nausea with all three pregnancies and a child born during a global pandemic, I’ve had no major issues. My children and I have always been healthy. I have a supportive partner who actually co-parents, not just “helps.” We can afford childcare and other forms of help. All of this meant that I was able to go back to work fairly quickly. One of my coauthors loves telling the story of how I forgot to tell her that I had had a third child, all in the middle of a paper revision.

And yet, in spite of these relatively smooth rides and quick returns, it took me a long time to stop fearing that people would take me less seriously because I had chosen to have children while an assistant professor. I worried that, with every pregnancy, it would become more and more evident that I was not committed enough, not ambitious enough, not “all in” enough. Perhaps forgetting to tell my coauthor I was having a baby was its own small symptom of that fear. I dreaded having people ask me, at conferences, how my babies were doing. Was that really the first thing that came to their mind when they saw me in a professional setting? Was I still a scholar to them, or had I become, first, a mother?

Guilt became an all too familiar feeling. First, academic guilt: the sense that no one was going to cut me a break just because I had children, and therefore I had to make sure I never gave anyone a reason to think I needed one. Then, soon enough, another kind of guilt: mom guilt, the one that hits when my daughter asks why I have to open my laptop on the weekend, why I cannot chaperone the field trip, or why I have to travel so much and miss all those bedtimes.

For a while, I thought these two guilts were opposites. Academia made me feel I was not working enough. Motherhood made me feel I was not present enough. I was failing at both, depending on who was asking.

With time, though, I have gained a different and more hopeful perspective. Having children has made my life better in many ways. Of course, I cannot work fifteen hours a day anymore. Of course, I have not slept properly in six years. If the literature is to be believed, I may also have donated some brain matter to each pregnancy. But my life has a different meaning now. And that has changed my relationship to work in ways I did not expect, and in ways that have made it healthier.

If a paper gets rejected, I move on. If someone else is more successful than me, I care for exactly five seconds. If academia tries to convince me that every seminar, email, referee report, grant, and meeting is existential, my children are there to remind me that dinner is at 6:00.

This, I think, has made me better at my job. My time has become brutally finite. I know that, no matter what, I have to leave the office at 5 p.m. So the work has to fit inside the time I actually have. I prioritize more, and better. I say no more often. I make decisions faster. And most importantly, I spend less time worrying about academic status games, because someone needs dinner, a bath, and a bedtime story.

I did not get there alone. Supportive colleagues, especially women, helped me in ways too numerous to count: giving me practical advice on how to plan and organize care, helping me protect my time from service and other non-essential demands, and teaching me how to say no. They showed me, again and again, that motherhood and ambition did not have to cancel each other out.

Seeing other women do it before me also mattered. An image in particular has stayed with me. During my postdoc, a woman in my department — young but very successful, and a role model for me — attended each weekly seminar with her baby in a carrier. Years later, I found myself doing the same thing with my third, who was born in the middle of a seminar series I was organizing. Having that image in my memory made me feel a little more like I still belonged in the room. Someone had done it before. Someone had brought the baby to the seminar and remained, fully, an academic.

This is not an argument that everyone should have children, or that motherhood improves work for everyone. It is only my experience. But my experience is that I am glad I did not wait until tenure. I am also glad that my institution did not expect me to do so: by allowing me to stop my tenure clock it recognized, at least formally, that having a child takes time.

That recognition, though, should not be mistaken for an exact accounting of the cost of motherhood. An extra year is not a conversion rate between pregnancy and CV lines. It is impossible to translate pregnancy, childbirth, recovery, sleep deprivation, childcare failures, guilt, joy, and the reorganization of one’s life into a precise number of months. No two mothers need the same thing, and the same mother may not need the same thing twice.

But that is not an argument against the extra year. Quite the opposite. It is an argument for using it as a buffer rather than as a perfect measure. It creates room for the fact that academic work gets done under very different conditions after a child is born, even for those of us who are healthy, supported, and lucky. And it matters not only because it gives people time, but because it changes what feels possible. It says, at least formally, that one does not have to wait until after tenure to become a parent.

That statement matters, especially in male-dominated fields. The advice to wait comes from a place of fear, and some of that fear is real. Academia is not designed around care. It rewards constant availability, geographic mobility, and the fiction of a worker without a body, a family, or other people depending on them. But if the answer is always “wait,” then motherhood starts to look like something one is allowed to consider only after the real work is done: after one has proven enough, published enough, and earned enough permission. And given how long the path to tenure has become, for many people that moment may simply never come.

I wish someone had told me more often that another version was possible: messy, expensive, exhausting, dependent on support and luck, but also full and deeply meaningful. I wish I had seen even more women with babies in seminar rooms, women leaving early for pickup, women saying no to trips, women writing papers after bedtime, women still ambitious and still very much in the game.

Formal policies, such as extra years and parental leaves, matter. But sometimes what makes the impossible feel possible is also something less formal: the image of someone just a few steps ahead of you, doing it already.