International Day of Women and Girls in Science: How does FSV UK support its female scientists in their career development?
On February 11, we celebrate the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, the aim of which is to remind us of their essential role in the scientific environment and to support their involvement in research. On this occasion, we introduce three participants of the faculty mentoring programme, which is intended to help female researchers with career development and with the reconciliation of both personal and professional life.
The mentoring programme, entitled ‘Living Life to the Full (Not Just Academic)’, was created at the initiative of the faculty’s Working Group for Equal Opportunities. The group was founded by the former Dean of FSV UK, Alice Němcová Tejkalová, at the end of her term of office. “During my term, I discovered that we have very few female associate professors and professors at FSV UK, even compared to other social science or humanities faculties. Even though their number (and the number of female members of the scientific council) has increased significantly during my tenure, we were still far behind. Likewise, I have been the only female director or dean in the history of the faculty, and it is certainly not because we have few capable women,” she describes. “So I wanted to use my social capital to help other women in their career development. I invited other successful women to the group, taking into account our institutes, to try to detect what is holding our female colleagues back,” she adds.
The members of the group first decided to try pilot workshops at the faculty focused on balancing personal and professional life. These received a great response and eventually became one of the parts of the current mentoring programme. “In addition to group activities, this is based on cooperation between the mentee and an experienced female or male mentor who has already completed habilitation or professorship and shares experiences on how to avoid obstacles,” explains Alice Němcová Tejkalová.
The group selected three academics for the mentoring programme – Barbora Spalová and Zuzana Kotherová from the Institute of Sociological Studies and Eliška Ullrichová from the Institute of International Studies. Each of them has taken a different life path, but they share one common goal – the effort to combine an academic career with motherhood and marriage.
Returning after six months
Eliška Ullrichová from the Institute of International Studies knew before the birth of her son that she would want to stay in touch with the academic sphere in some way during her parental leave. She realized that this would involve changing the way she had worked so as not to neglect her family or herself. She only returned to the faculty three months ago, when her first child turned six months old. She currently works part-time and, as she says, the balance between the two roles is so far quite harmonious and she enjoys everything she does. “However, there will definitely be more difficult times. And then we’ll see,” she mentions.
The key to combining the roles of mother and academic is the support of those around her. First and foremost, she highlights the help from her husband, who has a flexible job and can therefore spend a lot of time with her son. “And also my immediate family, who greatly supports me in my early comeback in the work process. And last but not least, my colleagues,” she continues.
“It is very important for me to see that they do not mind having a child at work. They try to involve me as much as possible, they motivate me and think of ways in which I could participate in various activities with my child and what they could do for this. Such a working environment is far from common and I appreciate it immensely,” she praises, adding that she greatly appreciates the space with a play corner and a changing table, which was created at IMS less than a year ago. “This step is a huge help, because you have a place to be with your small child or someone can look after them during meetings, classes, etc. At the same time, it helps a lot when you know that you are not alone. In other words, the people around you understand how demanding childcare is,” she says.
In the future, she would also appreciate the establishment of a separate room for parents with children of different ages with quick access to water, a microwave and an electric kettle, and last but not least, the availability of a playground near the faculty buildings. “And also regular mentoring programmes, because as the child ages, the needs of both the child and the working parents change,” she notes. She expects the current mentoring programme to help her find a balance between personal and professional life. “The main reason why I signed up for the programme was to be able to find time for work during this period. I hope it will help me further develop my career while fully enjoying motherhood and other joys of life,” she adds.
One challenge after another
On the contrary, for Zuzana Kotherová from the Institute of Sociological Studies, balancing personal and professional life is still a big challenge – she sees it as a constant struggle between two roles: mother and academic. “I like both of these roles and I want to do them well, or rather feel like I do them well. But it often seems to me that I am not doing as well as I would like, I lack time and I am always catching up and owing something. My nature certainly plays a role in this – I am a perfectionist, which further intensifies this feeling,” she notes.
The flexibility of the academic environment helps her the most – except teaching, she can plan her time in accordance with her own interests. “Academic work can be done anytime and from anywhere, we have the option of working remotely and in some cases even online teaching. The possibility of part-time work is also a huge advantage,” she says. At the same time, she notes that the aforementioned flexibility can also be double-edged. “It means that I can work whenever I want, and sometimes that means I’m actually working all the time. The lines between work and personal life are blurred, which is not always easy,” she says. But what she says is not double-edged and what definitely helps her are her colleagues. “The opportunity to share experiences, to have allies in academia with whom I can consult or just encourage each other is irreplaceable for me,” she adds.
She considers one of the biggest challenges for female scientists and academics to be that their most productive academic years often coincide with the period when they are planning a family. And, as she emphasizes, returning after maternity leave can be difficult. “The academic environment is constantly evolving, grants and professional growth continue, and it is not easy to jump back into it. Part-time jobs can also lead to a lower chance of getting a grant, leading projects, or advancing in your career,” she notes. “Another problem I see is that as a mother I cannot always be where I would like to be – whether it is conferences, networking meetings or research stays abroad. And although academia is opening up to hybrid possibilities, personal presence is key,” she adds.
Some time ago, for example, she tried a three-week internship at a university in France, which ended up being a rather demanding experience for her. “The conflict between the roles of academic, mother and wife came out even more strongly here. I felt that I could not give full attention to either of these roles,” she mentions. “For myself, I prefer a clean solution – either a full-fledged internship or full-fledged time with my family – not a combination of both,” she adds.
On the other hand, she sees that some institutions, including FSV UK, are already beginning to reflect the need for more significant support for academic mothers. She positively evaluates mentoring programmes or the possibility of individual adjustments to working hours. “I think it’s important for universities to actively look for ways to ensure that women are not disadvantaged in academia simply because they choose parenthood,” she emphasizes.
She expects the faculty mentoring programme to help her find the space to systematically work on her habilitation – so that she can manage her work commitments, balance them with family life, and at the same time not feel like she’s neglecting any area. “The name of the programme, ‘Living Life to the Fullest (Not Just Academic)’, perfectly captures how I feel – and it’s exactly the area I want and need to work with,” she says. “I’m grateful to have the opportunity to be a part of it, and I want to say thank you for that,” she adds.
Combining a large family and a career
Barbora Spalová from the Institute of Sociological Studies has had children since the beginning of her academic career. At the beginning of her doctoral studies at FSV UK she and her husband adopted a child. “Today, he is my oldest son, who turned 20. Very soon after we brought him home as a baby, I became pregnant. I was in such a hurry that I didn’t even know about it for a long time,” she recalls. At that time, she was already living with her family in a remote village on the border of Germany and Poland, and she also had to commute to Prague and Pardubice, where she also worked. In the following years, another daughter was born, and she extended her doctoral studies to seven years. “It seemed like a good combination. You have children and a hobby at the same time. I wrote a little, read a little, and I didn’t focus entirely on carrot puree,” she laughs. “And on top of that, I was doing research in Christian churches in Bohemia, where there was no problem when I came there with three children,” she adds.
One of the defining moments of her career was the defense of her dissertation, during which she encountered unpleasant behaviour from her opponent. One review described her work as excellent, but another did not recommend her for defense. “It said, among other things, that my work gave the impression that a figure skater had gone out onto the ice where hard hockey was played. I thought to myself that this was somewhat of a gendered metaphor – that science is hard hockey, which is done by men, and I am just some figure skater here,” she describes, noting that in her opinion the work did not represent just some kind of ‘women’s writing’. “Yes, I wrote the work very subjectively and reflexively, telling about my experiences, but I am an anthropologist,” she emphasizes. She eventually successfully defended her dissertation, thanks to French sociologist Françoise Mayer, who supported her on the spot and personally defended her.
However, in the academic environment itself, she did not encounter any obstacles due to being a woman. “But I completely understand that female doctoral students are ‘dropped out’ much more, because they say to themselves that they would rather take care of a child than write a dissertation at night. Notably, when some guy tells them how to write something so that they don’t end up like figure skaters,” she notes.
After completing her doctoral studies, she gave birth to another son. When he was three years old, she started working part-time at the ISS and continued her research work. Three years ago, during the Covid-19 pandemic, her fifth child was unexpectedly born, which presented a new challenge in combining personal and professional life. “At the time, I was managing two grants and I couldn’t just hand them over to someone. So I was only home for a short while. I returned four months after giving birth,” she says. Looking back, she greatly appreciates the significant support from the institute, which provided her with the necessary facilities – for example, colleagues and students helped her push the stroller during her lectures. “My husband also has a flexible job, so if I need to go away for a week to do research, it’s not such a problem. It wouldn’t have been possible without him,” she adds.
When her youngest daughter was not even a year old, she and her whole family went to California for seven months on a Fulbright scholarship. She sees the great advantage of this grant scheme primarily in the fact that it supports trips with families. “Thanks to that, we were able to afford it. Of course, the scholarship didn’t cover all the costs, but it was quite a bit of help,” she says, noting that it was a great experience for both her and the whole family. “My husband was able to leave his job and was on parental leave. It brought the family together a lot. It was great for me because I had half a year just for research and had more or less no other responsibilities besides managing my family,” she adds.
She signed up for faculty mentoring programme primarily to start the writing process for her next monograph. “I have a lot of interesting material from Fulbright. I would like to try to connect it with the European terrain and write it in a book. Since my ‘figure skating’ dissertation, I have published several publications, but they have always been the result of a joint grant. Now I would like to try to write a more personal book, so we will see how it goes,” she says. “So far, in the programme, we are comparing our own priorities and dealing with practical things such as time management. We have also exchanged experiences with other mentees. It is a very nice support,” she adds.
Working Group for Equal Opportunities
In the first year of its existence, the working group, still under the original name Working Group for Detecting Possible Obstacles in the Career Development of Women, was concerned with mapping the career conditions of women at the faculty and identifying possible obstacles. “It became clear relatively quickly that the biggest problem is that women in AP2, VP2 or L2 positions have to deal with a lot of personal and work challenges at the same time. And without targeted support and work with this specific group so that they try to combine everything meaningfully, and not, for example, forcefully postpone further career development due to motherhood, we will not see a significantly higher number of associate professors and professors,” describes the initiator of the group, Alice Němcová Tejkalová.
Based on this, the group made proposals to the faculty management to improve the situation and started the aforementioned mentoring programme for female academics before the habilitation procedure. The Mentoring Institute will be responsible for organizing the programme and the seminars on developing soft skills.
“For example, it turns out that quite a few educational institutions offer mothers part-time jobs. However, this is not suitable for everyone, as it involves much less money, and the woman thus finds herself economically in a partnership on the second floor, and when it is necessary to stay at home with the child, for example, when they have a cold, it is her who stays at home and loses work time so that the family does not lose income. From what I have had the opportunity to see at our faculty, it is much better for their further career development when, if it suits them, women in such a situation have full-time jobs with flexible working hours, where only the teaching time is fixed, and the overall annual performance is evaluated,” concludes Alice Němcová Tejkalová.
