WSU biologist Stephanie Porter’s first child was six months old in 2011 when she and her husband, a fellow scientist, first ventured to an academic conference together.
The results, she said, were a disaster. On-site child care wouldn’t take her infant daughter, Hazel. There were no changing tables in the men’s room, and Porter’s husband was kicked out of the baby room for being a man. And while they did their best to pass Hazel back and forth, Porter usually ended up taking their still exclusively breastfed daughter when there were sessions she and her husband both wanted to attend.
“Honestly, I stopped going to conferences when I had young children,” Porter said.
Porter, an assistant biology professor at WSU Vancouver, is in a national group hoping to level the field for mothers in science, particularly at academic conferences. Under the name “A Working Group of Mothers in Science,” she and 45 other women wrote “How to tackle the childcare-conference conundrum,” an opinion piece published in scientific journal, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
The article offers a blueprint on ways to make conferences more accommodating to families, like offering adequate child care, providing comfortable lactation rooms and tolerating the presence of babies in conference sessions or at lectures.