Motherhood & A Career in Research: Finding Balance

Amanda Hewes, education program manager for the Gene Editing Institute, takes a lot of calls.

She gets phone calls from teachers about educational programming and how many seats remain for on-site learning opportunities. She meets over a video conference with partner organizations that want to distribute CRISPR in a BoxTM, the institute’s educational toolkit, to more locations. She gets calls down the hallway from her young mentees asking for assistance in running gels of their experiments.

But who calls her most? Her nine-month-old baby’s day-care. Just last week, she had to leave part way through a roundtable discussion about challenges in motherhood to answer a phone call about her child.

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“Seems only appropriate,” commented Natalia Rivera-Torres, Ph.D., a principal investigator in the lab, as the others nod in quiet agreement.

“It’s like the path of motherhood is putting out fires left and right,” says Katelynn Owens, another P.I. “We’re just taking on different tasks as they come.”

Women make up 80% of the Gene Editing Institute employees, and the Institute has an equally staggering percentage of parents. Fifty percent of the lab is made up of mothers, with children ranging from only a few days old to adults with careers of their own. Women in the lab with children are involved with extensive research projects, with a potential for years of future research and clinical trials before any results may show. That means that these researchers and scientists commit to years of work with the institute, while also planning their personal lives and families.

This is a staggering change from the norm. In the overall world of STEM, the breadwinner husband is still a hanging force above maternal career advancement. Research has shown that nearly one-half of new mothers and nearly one-quarter of new fathers leave full-time STEM employment after having children. And while most of these fathers change the sector of employment and remain full-time, mothers often move to part-time work or become stay-at-home parents.

These aren’t poor individual decisions but may indicate a continued pattern of a lack of support for new mothers or parents. Mothers also face a maternal ceiling in addition to the already existent gender barriers, often being paid lower salaries, are less likely to be hired or promoted, and are perceived as less committed to the work they do.

The good news? There are solutions that are breaking the single-gendered breadwinner mold.

ChristianaCare recently added a baseline of 12 weeks of paid parental leave for employees for fiscal year 2021. This leave policy extended into the Gene Editing Institute at a time when many employees were starting their families, reducing the stress of this decision at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic presented uncertainty for infant health.

Paid parental leave can have significant positive effects on health and economic outcomes throughout the life cycle of a child. It supports bonding, breastfeeding, access to care, and improved maternal health. It can also reduce the rates of hospitalizations among infants and lead to long-term positive health outcomes later in life.

“The maternity leave was really good,” says Natalia Rivera-Torres, mother of a ten-month-old boy named Matthias. “My sister, who’s currently pregnant, has a leave policy at her company that’s only six weeks. And thinking about it now, would I have been able to leave my six-week-old baby at daycare? Being able to go through twelve weeks of leave gave me a better sense of security, and of feeling like, ‘Okay, he’s an older infant now.’ It’s still hard, but I can feel the support from administration and leadership on this. Meetings can be moved around the time that you block off for emergencies. They understand here that work doesn’t always come first.”

An additional support system for mothers comes in the form of a lactation room that was installed in the institute in fall 2022, allowing a parent to find privacy in the workplace and ensures silence and isolation for pumping, breastfeeding, or any reason. The mothers I spoke to speak of it as a ‘luxury’ that should become more of a requirement.

“It’s a sacred place for you,” says Natalia. “I know there are other people that don’t have that luxury and accommodation at work, but here, the support from leadership has been really helpful. It’s not like that everywhere else.”

Accommodations from higher-ups are only one piece of that puzzle, though. The community aspect of motherhood is emphasized every day at the institute. The Institute is one of those villages that can help raise a child. It has to be, with 11 mothers engaging with each other across the lab on a daily basis and the organization’s commitment to recruiting the best talent without that talent worrying about if they’ll be able to have a family. Support ranges from advice on which preschools to engage with or what solid foods are best to approach first, to reassurances about not worrying about milestones, to hugs on rough days. Scientists take different shifts in the lab space to accommodate a mother who may need to leave early to take a toddler to a doctor’s appointment.

“Maternity really makes you think about priorities and prioritization,” says London McGill, a staff scientist with a 5-month-old girl. “Now that I’m back here, I have to think about things I can get done before noon, so that if something comes in on the back end, whether it's in the lab or at childcare, I can be prepared. But also, I know that because we can overlap our schedules, if I don’t finish something, Natalia can do it. And if she can’t finish it, Amanda or Kristen can, or Pawel, if he doesn’t have to run off to help his kid. We can band together if anything goes wrong.”

With someone in the office from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., the institute isn’t slowing down on any of its research efforts, even with six new births among scientists since the beginning of 2022. Scientists continue to pursue effective treatments for chemoresistance in lung cancer patients, and educators host students in the Learning Lab space downstairs to teach a full gene editing experiment with color-changing bacteria. Within clinical trials quickly approaching, and a goal of teaching 1,000 students by spring 2024, the workplace is revving with energy and potential, like a pendulum on the upswing. If anyone couldn’t handle the pressure, they’d be putting in their two weeks’ notice.

But no mom has yet. And with robust systems of maternity aid in place through our parent company and laboratory community, they continue to feel supported academically and personally.

“It’s been so fun to have this organic shared bond between the mothers in this lab,” says Deirdre Hake, director of strategy and business development at the institute. “Everyone has their own unique situation, and there’s not one mold that’s going to make it work, but everyone’s making it work here. Everyone has their own journey, and I think that’s pretty special.”