Losing at the waiting game

I wrote this short narrative for a research study about Canadian maternity benefits policy that I participated in last spring. I thought it might make for good comment discussion here.

When I had my daughter in January 2005, I was the envy of every Canadian mother...from a benefits standpoint, that is. My pregnancy had gone into distress in early December and my doctor insisted I stop work. My work-place granted me an extended sick leave until my due date. For 8 weeks I lay on my couch eating Christmas bon-bons while raking in my full salary. Oh, and yes, I was scared to death that my placenta was starving my child and that she was suffering severe trauma inside the womb. This post is about policy, though, not emotions, and from a policy standpoint, I had it made. I know that lots of other women in my shoes (or should I say bed-rest pjs with Birkenstocks?) have not have it so good.

When Miss M arrived, a healthy, albeit scrawny, baby at the end of January, I took the full-year Canadian maternity leave. My employer, a mid-sized university with a strong faculty/librarian union, granted me par benefits with its academic staff unit even though, as a half-time employee, I was not allowed to be in the union and was therefore not entitled to union benefits. The end result was that I was paid 95% of my salary for the duration of my leave. My career was waiting for me upon my return to the workplace. Nice work if you can get it, eh?

Although I am beyond BEYOND grateful for the benefits I received, I would like to take a moment to temper my situation with a bit of life history. When I did my undergrad back in the mid-1980s, I studied with a total of two women professors out of the 20 or so professors I took courses from. Both women were childless. By the time I started grad school in 1988, I knew I wanted to be an academic, not just because I liked the work but because I saw myself as an ambitious young feminist who wanted to change the way other young women would eventually be able to access higher education. I wanted to be that female role model that I had missed having. While I was doing my Master's at Queen's, a fellow student was studying for her PhD comprehensive exams. She was the mother of two young children. The day before she was scheduled to write her generalist exam, one of her children became ill and required emergency surgery. At the time, Queen's had a strict policy vis-a-vis comprehensive examinations. Because this woman was unable to write the exam on the assigned day, she was forced to wait 6 months until the next scheduled exam day. Her career was stalled for six months because the grad school could not accommodate motherhood.

You may think this an isolated example but I assure you that at the time, and in many respects still, the problems were systemic. Graduate awards such as SSHRCC fellowships and provincial graduate scholarships did not allow for any kind of parental leave either in terms of time or money. Women who took too long to finish their degrees were considered stale and un-hireable. The only path to a future in academia was to delay, delay, delay having children. My generation was at the cusp of key changes to the system; my peers were the women who were made into test cases along the way. I watched from a close distance. I saw the risks in having children but I did not want to be the risk taker. I was young. I believed my fertility was infinitely deferrable.

In the late 1990s, I was working as a librarian for a feminist, academic research project. One of my colleagues, a thirty-something post-doctoral fellow, got pregnant. The research grant made no accommodations for maternity leave. My friend took her two week vacation when the baby was born and was back at work on the Monday of week 3. To do otherwise would have sabotaged a career that she had invested 10 years of higher education into. The rest of us, all young, academic women, were demoralized that our feminist project could and would do no better.

I did eventually become an academic--an academic librarian not a professor; the price of the latter was too great. When I was 38, my husband and I finally decided to have a child. I still did not have a job with workplace benefits despite having given over most of my fertile life to my career. Because I worked part-time, I was not entitled to union maternity benefits but my job was now regular and I had finally earned the right for a Canadian mat leave. It was only because of the good will of my employer that I received the top-up benefits I did. We had our first child when I was 39. I am now 42 and have recently suffered two miscarriages. It seems clear that our daughter will be an only child. Time has won the race.

There are a lot more women professors at Universities than there were when I left high school 24 years ago. Many are still childless, though, or they have waited to procreate until late in their fertile lives. While many universities often offer extremely generous benefits packages, they can afford to do so because, by and large, academic women come to their careers too late in life to take proper advantage of them.