Let’s not pass down the pain we endured as early career researchers

At a recent career-development event for early-career researchers (ECRs), an established professor described completing their doctoral thesis while caring for a newborn.

Determined to submit on time, they sacrificed most of their parental leave and trained themselves to write in tiny fragments between feeds and naps. They spoke with understandable pride about their resilience. Yet they also confessed that, in retrospect, they wished they had allowed themselves the time off they were entitled to.

Their story lingered with me because I recognised its emotional architecture: many of us who survive our ECR years are immensely proud of our journeys.

I am no exception. During an exhausting semester earlier in my career, I taught 14 contact hours per week. I came home every day drained, irritable and hoarse, needing to vent before I could think clearly again. According to the university’s workload model, my teaching commitments alone accounted for a standard 37.5-hour workweek. Yet I continued to launch new research projects and revise manuscripts, too, working, in reality, closer to 70 hours a week.

For a long time, when more junior colleagues asked how I maintained research productivity while teaching so much, I took pride in this answer. Half joking, I told them that the unpaid research hours, often deep in the night, justified my belief that I maintained a balanced teaching-research workload despite the heavy teaching load.

This thought kept me going at the time, but it concealed a deeper issue: the quiet normalisation of excessive workloads for ECRs, and the tacit implication that the pain now will be worth the gain later on.

Hard work certainly played its part in my own successful transition from precarity to stability, but it was not the whole story. Timing, opportunity and luck all played a role, too. And, as I remind my research methods students, we cannot “sample on the dependent variable”: the fact that some people have survived a system built on overwork does not mean everyone will. It does not mean that the system is fair or well designed. A leaking ship is not redeemed by the few who reach the shore.

These concerns have become sharper for me since serving on several selection panels for entry-level positions. The competition is intense. Many applicants present publication records that would once have been associated with mid-career academics. This escalation has occurred as precarious employment conditions have proliferated, promotion pathways have dwindled and research funding has shrunk.

Notwithstanding universities’ somewhat incongruous well-being initiatives, success is easily framed in such an environment as the reward for extreme sacrifice. Overwork becomes a badge of honour, and resting feels like an indulgence rather than a necessity.

Those of us who have moved beyond the ECR stage need to be honest about this. After all, responsibility for facilitating change lies not only with governments or senior managers but also with established academics who sit on recruitment and promotion committees. We have, I believe, more influence over norms and expectations than we sometimes admit.

One practical step we could take would be to adopt the principle of assessing candidates on achievements relative to opportunity, rather than on sheer output volume. As my recent recruitment experience shows, applicants for an entry-level role can differ substantially in their career stage, from newly minted PhDs to scholars with established positions way exceeding the advertised pay scale. That is especially true in a tight job market. But if a position is genuinely designed for early-career entrants then priority should logically be given to those at the appropriate career stage, rather than to a senior scholar whom people believe can bring in grants and publications.

Another possible step selection committees could take would be to limit the number of research outputs we will consider in applications for such roles. Requiring candidates to submit only a small selection of representative work would shift attention from quantity to quality and help curb the arms race that makes ECRs feel compelled to publish at unsustainable rates merely to remain visible in the competition. It would also substantially reduce the workload of selection committees themselves.

These changes would not resolve every structural problem. However, they could disrupt the winner-takes-all environment that fuels unsustainable work patterns and penalises those with caring responsibilities, health issues or heavier teaching loads. In the longer term, they may help to create a healthier and fairer competitive landscape – one that empowers ECRs rather than exploits them.

I remain proud of what I achieved during that punishing semester of 14-hour teaching weeks. But pride can coexist with sobriety: this should not be a template for anyone’s early academic career.

Hard work will always be part of the recipe for academic success. However, those of us who have survived the unreasonable pressures of a flawed system should not pass down the pain we endured. Instead, we should draw on that experience to champion a set of expectations that allow ECRs’ careers to flourish even as they maintain something resembling a balanced life.

Yu Tao is an associate professor in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Western Australia.