Female academics ‘increasingly delay motherhood’ until age 35

Many more female PhD graduates are delaying parenthood until they have established an academic career, says a major international study whose results suggest younger mothers face significant professional disadvantages.

Drawing on a global survey of 8,097 academic parents, the study published recently in the Springer journal Higher Education identified key trends for scholars depending on their gender, with women much more likely to complete a PhD before the age of 30 and delay parenthood until after 35.

In contrast, men tended to become parents during their doctoral studies and often had three or more children by the age of 40.

Delaying parenthood until after 35 was “particularly prevalent” among women born after 1970 (the study’s youngest two cohorts), who tended to wait about seven years until after PhD completion to have children, explains the study by researchers based in Germany, the UK, Canada and the US.

That trend likely reflected the “widely-recognised, if problematic, logic that early-career years are decisive for long-term academic success”, said the study, whose respondents mainly came from the US, UK and Canada.

Early-career mothers also saw “pronounced penalties” in long-term scientific impact, as measured by citation rates, compared with men who had children prior to obtaining their doctorate, for whom “penalties were largely absent”.

There were “no significant gender differences” in PhD attainment for those who had no children, while women who delayed parenthood until after 35 had similar citation rates to male peers, the paper notes.

Those findings reinforce evidence that “parenthood tends to support men’s upwards career trajectories while constraining women’s, with women more likely to shift to teaching-focused roles despite comparable career aspirations, the paper argues.

Noting the “asymmetric consequences [of parenthood] for women and men”, its lead author Xinyi Zhao, a researcher at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research and the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science at the University of Oxford, told Times Higher Education that “women are systematically more likely to experience conflict between career demands and parenthood in ways that men are not”.

“Crucially, our findings are not an argument for encouraging women to delay parenthood further. Rather, they highlight a persistent structural problem: even as academia has achieved broad gender balance at the doctoral level, the leaky pipeline remains a serious issue, and parenthood is a key mechanism driving it,” continued Zhao.

“Women who become parents early are significantly more likely to leave academia – not because they lack ability or ambition, but because the system is not designed to accommodate the reality of their lives,” she added.

Charter schemes like the UK’s Athena Swan initiative, designed to improve female representation in UK universities, “confront more directly” these structural challenges, said Zhao, who said there is a “real risk that universities gravitate toward the more visible, easier-to-implement interventions, such as role model programmes, speaker series, women’s networks, because they generate goodwill and positive optics without requiring difficult institutional change.”

“They are relatively low cost and low conflict, which makes them attractive. But our findings suggest universities need to be more precise and honest in their diagnosis of what the problem actually is,” she said.

“Role models and representation targets are very valuable, but they address downstream symptoms rather than upstream causes,” said Zhao, who insisted the “harder, slower work is structural reform, and universities have been too cautious in pursuing it”.

Efforts to help academic mothers should go “beyond hiring systems and representation targets”, she continued, stating they should “actively monitor and support what happens to women’s careers after they are recruited, such as tracking promotion rates, grant success, publication output, and retention at key career transitions, and being willing to ask why women are dropping out or stalling at particular points”.

“Regular surveys of staff experience, particularly around the intersection of caregiving and career pressures, would give universities much more actionable information than diversity statistics alone,” recommended Zhao.

“The question should not just be ‘how many women do we have’ but “what is happening to their careers once they are here, and at what point are we losing them,” she said.

“Our findings suggest the problem is not that women lack inspiration or confidence. The architecture of academic careers itself, including fixed-term contracts, continuous productivity expectations, rigid grant timelines, does not accommodate caregiving,” said Zhao.

“Until universities name that problem explicitly in their equity strategies, the interventions they design will continue to address the wrong thing. Role models have real symbolic value, but a woman seeing another successful female professor does not change the fact that her fellowship clock will not pause when she has a baby, or that taking maternity leave during a postdoc may effectively end her chances of competing for the next position,” she explained.

“That is what needs to be fixed, and it requires universities to be far more explicit about what they are actually trying to change,” said Zhao.

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com