Grass-roots pressure grows to boost support for breastfeeding scientists

The months following the birth of Colleen Sullivan’s first child, a son, in 2014 were rough. Sullivan, a developmental psychologist at Worcester State University in Worcester, Massachusetts, was back teaching just three weeks after an emergency caesarean section, pumping breast milk between classes and coming home, exhausted, to her newborn in the evenings.

By the time of her daughter’s birth, three years later, Sullivan felt more secure in her parenting and career, and knew what she needed to do to advocate for herself. She used five years’ worth of accumulated sick leave to offload some of her coursework, and often brought her daughter to campus meetings involving colleagues and students.

But one morning, an e-mail from human resources landed in her inbox. An anonymous complaint had been filed, alleging that Sullivan had violated the university’s policy that employees “find appropriate childcare arrangements rather than bringing children to work”, unless absolutely necessary. The e-mail had been sent not just to her, but also to senior leadership at the university and in her department, and although the complaint was quickly dismissed, Sullivan says the experience left her mortified.

“I thought I felt comfortable in my department, but after that report, I made a choice not to bring my children on campus as much,” she says. “It felt like losing a part of myself — not only was it impacting my workspace, it was also impacting my parenting and the ease with which I could feed my child, which really got under my skin.” The situation was particularly painful because Sullivan herself had grown up on the campus where her mother was a behavioural psychologist, and took pleasure in seeing history repeat itself.

Researcher parents are paying a high price for conference travel — here’s how to fix it

Around the world, progress is being made towards gender equity in academia, but policies and attitudes often fall short of fully supporting breastfeeding mothers, despite long-standing evidence as to the benefits that it provides to both parent and child. To ensure that a lack of support isn’t leading to disproportionate burdens being placed on women and early-career scientists starting families, many groups are working to bring structural change to academia, including governments, institutions, funding agencies and advocacy organizations. The aim is to offer paid parental leave policies and better workplace facilities, such as lactation rooms, as well as flexible funding to accommodate the needs of families and advocate for a more supportive environment for parents and carers.

Where support falls short

The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends that new mothers breastfeed exclusively — meaning not feeding babies any other foods or liquids, including water — for the first six months, and that they continue to breastfeed non-exclusively until their child turns two.

Sonia Hernández Cordero, a nutritionist at Iberoamerican University in Mexico City, says that these recommendations are informed by what scientists know about the benefits of breastfeeding for both mother and child. “Breastfeeding is considered one of the most cost-effective measures to promote the well-being of the whole population,” Hernández Cordero says.

However, just under half of mothers worldwide meet those goals. Elizabeth Wambui Kimani-Murage, a public-health nutritionist at the African Population and Health Research Center in Nairobi, says that the barriers to continued breastfeeding can be structural or cultural. Some mothers lack the necessary support, whereas others live in countries where feeding infants formula is the norm. Furthermore, some might simply not want to breastfeed — a decision that those interviewed by Nature say should also be accepted and supported.

In academia, barriers to breastfeeding are well known anecdotally, but difficult to quantify. Research has documented a ‘leaky pipeline’ in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) careers, with women and members of other marginalized groups leaving in greater numbers compared with white men. Isabel Torres, a mother of four and the co-founder of the France-based non-profit body Mothers in Science (MIS), says that mothers pay a particular penalty. MIS launched a global survey in 2020 focusing on parenthood and career progression, which garnered responses from roughly 9,000 respondents across 128 countries. Torres says that nearly one-third of mothers who responded extended their maternity leave to breastfeed, “which suggests that a lack of breastfeeding support at research institutions negatively impacts women’s careers”.

There are aspects of academic culture as well that might hinder a mother’s ability to breastfeed. Careers in research tend to be able to accommodate flexible scheduling, which can be helpful for parents, but expectations around commitment to work are sky-high, particularly during the early-career stages when many people are starting families. Mothers might feel they cannot afford to step away from work — whether to breastfeed or express milk — or might fear being judged or discriminated against for taking advantage of family-friendly policies.

The parenting penalties faced by scientist mothers

“When I had children, I did feel like I was written out of opportunities, either because people assumed I wouldn’t be interested or because they didn’t think of me at all,” says Tulika Bose, an experimental particle physicist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Bose did not disclose her first pregnancy when she and her spouse were seeking new jobs, because she worried they’d be discriminated against. And indeed, soon after giving birth, Bose was passed over for an opportunity in another country that she had been shortlisted for the previous year. “The only thing that had changed was that I had a child,” she says, adding that she felt that assumptions were being made about her capacity and priorities.

Breastfeeding scorecard

Recognizing that many countries are failing to meet breastfeeding recommendations, agencies around the world are launching initiatives to draft new policies and cultivate a supportive culture. In 2017, the WHO partnered with the United Nations children’s charity UNICEF to create the Global Breastfeeding Collective (GBC), which aims to increase the rate of exclusive breastfeeding to 70% by 2030. The collective releases an annual report card for 194 countries, categorizing them on the basis of their commitments to breastfeeding policy actions and practices, including parental leave and workplace accommodations. For example, in 2022, Brazil and France scored green for having both nationally mandated paid breaks and facilities in the workplace, the United States scored orange for having only mandated facilities, and the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia scored red for not having either.

Interest in better support for breastfeeding is rising in STEM workspaces as well, where women make up about one-third of the workforce. Fernanda Staniscuaski, a biologist at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and co-founder of the non-profit body Parents in Science, says that as other aspects of gender equity fall into place, members of the organization have become more vocal about breastfeeding resources. Estimates vary, but mothers ultimately sacrifice 1,000–2,000 hours per year when they breastfeed or express milk (by contrast, a full-time, 40-hour-per-week job with 3 weeks’ annual holiday would take up 1,960 hours). “It’s a personal choice, and a lot of people really want to be able to sustain breastfeeding,” she says. “But if you don’t have support, it’s quite hard.”

At academic institutions, support can take many different forms. A big way to support breastfeeding scientists is to offer them paid parental leave that is long enough to cover a significant portion of that first six months of exclusive breastfeeding.

Currently, only 42% of the countries surveyed by the GBC meet its recommendations, which include 14 weeks of maternity leave covered by at least two-thirds of a parent’s salary. Universities and funding agencies have a responsibility to help bridge that gap, researchers say. And in countries such as the United States, which has no federally mandated paid leave, they might be the only sources of support. As of 2018, roughly 60% of research universities in the United States and Canada had paid parental leave, averaging 14.2 weeks for women and 11.6 weeks for men. “Parental leave is something that these groups can choose to offer, just like other aspects of health insurance,” says Ernestine Gheyoh Ndzi, a legal scholar at York St John University, UK, who focuses on parenting and employment law. “Even if they can’t cover the full recommendation [for leave], some financial support for parenting is a green flag.”

Both the US National Science Foundation and the US National Institutes of Health offer their grant awardees family-friendly policies, including paid leave for faculty members, doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows; funding to hire technicians to keep experiments running during leave; and subsidies for childcare, all of which go into supporting breastfeeding. The European Research Council (ERC) adapted its policies so that, following the birth of a child, parents are granted an extension of their eligibility to apply for Starting and Consolidator grants — 18 months per child for women and an amount of time equal to their paternity leave for men (for other examples, see ‘Funding resources for working scientists’).

Breastfeeding mums are finally getting spaces to pump at some US institutions

Providing mothers with adequate leave is only half of the equation, however. For those who prefer to or must return to work, supporting them as they breastfeed in the workplace becomes equally important. The GBC has also found that just one in five countries has mandated paid lactation breaks and breastfeeding facilities. As such, mothers across the world have shared their experiences of expressing breast milk or breastfeeding at their desks, in a corner of the lab, on the floor, in their cars, or in storage cupboards, bathrooms, prayer rooms and first-aid stations.

Nicole Bridges, a communications researcher at Western Sydney University in Australia, volunteers with a group called the Australian Breastfeeding Association (ABA) that oversees an accreditation programme to become a breastfeeding-friendly workplace. To qualify, institutions must have policies that allow for flexible time and lactation breaks, provide rooms for expressing milk or breastfeeding (ideally with access to a sink and refrigerator), and promote a supportive culture. So far, roughly 40 educational institutions and health centres have been accredited across Australia, and Bridges says that this programme, along with frameworks such as the international Athena Swan Charter, “have really done an excellent job of incentivizing workplaces to up their game”.

Taking to the field

Science isn’t done only on university campuses and in laboratories, however. In many disciplines, field research is a major component, and breastfeeding support in those spaces remains scant.

Jessica Thompson, a biological anthropologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and mother of three, has travelled to do fieldwork almost every year since 1997, and says the process is so linked to her sense of self that she had a small identity crisis when she decided not to go this year, to catch up on a backlog of work. The only other times she has held off were when she was moving internationally and when she was breastfeeding — a choice she says she agonized over.

In 2022, those experiences prompted her and two colleagues to launch a survey on career choices in the field sciences. Although the results remain preliminary, Thompson says that on the basis of the 672 responses so far, it’s “very, very clear” that logistical and financial concerns are the main factors that dissuade people who are breastfeeding from taking on fieldwork. At least one mother who attempted to breastfeed during fieldwork said the experience was a drain on her mental health, noting that stopping breastfeeding “would have been psychologically and mentally beneficial for me, and not harmful to my child”.

Verónica Laura Lozano, an ecotoxicologist at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council in Buenos Aires, Argentina, experienced a similar challenge in 2022, when she and a colleague resolved to do fieldwork with their families in tow, including their partners, two young daughters and a one-year-old who was still breastfeeding. As with many types of research funding, Lozano’s grant did not extend to dependents, and so she had to pay out of her own pocket to transport her family to a remote part of northern Argentina. She breastfed in between water-sampling stints and says that, although it was helpful having people there to look after the children, the experience still required her to adopt a slower pace and embrace delays.

“In academia, we ask people to breastfeed their children for two years, but then we don’t do all the things to allow it,” she says. “For my family, it was very hard to organize this travel, but in the end, it was a relief to be able to continue breastfeeding.”

Children on fieldwork: how two scientist mothers made it happen

Despite the challenges, both women say having their children with them in the field has also created opportunities and widened their perspectives. For Thompson, bringing her children to field sites in East Africa deepened her connection to the local community and made her appreciate the concept of alloparenting — a form of communal caring for children that once allowed our ancestors to spread across the globe. And when she discovered the bones of a child at one of her excavations, she had a newfound sense of empathy for the scene before her.

“Being pregnant and then actually excavating those delicate little bones — I just felt it so deeply, that sense of wondering what happened here,” Thompson says. “There’s a growing acknowledgement that there’s a human piece to our work, and as we embrace more diverse perspectives, we see that it’s not actually adding any value to pretend to be objective when you’re not.”

Lessons from Scandinavia

To witness the long-term benefits of parent-friendly policies and attitudes, look at places that have prioritized them. Nordic countries such as Sweden, Denmark and Iceland are considered to have the most generous and comprehensive parental leave, and perhaps it’s no coincidence that they consistently rank among the most highly developed and happiest countries. In Sweden, parents can take up to 480 days of paid, shared leave per child, and can reduce their working hours by up to one-quarter until the child turns eight. Norway provides up to 2 hours of paid time to breastfeed each day. As a consequence, women in these countries breastfeed at rates above the global average, even as women in other European countries struggle.

“It’s true these countries have higher taxes, but I’d say they’re putting that money to good use,” says Amy Brown, a public-health researcher at Swansea University, UK, who focuses on parenthood. “They’ve made a big investment in maternal, child and family health, and unsurprisingly, it has paid off.”

Brown says that her own field, maternal and infant health, is also an example of what a supportive community can look like. She sometimes travels with her children to conferences — events that have historically failed to support parents. Long before such practices became more common across academia, the meetings she attended were providing grants to either bring dependents or finance childcare at home, setting aside private spaces for expressing milk and breastfeeding and offering hybrid options.

Brown’s experiences are a far cry from the painful feelings Sullivan experienced on her campus, and show that when a research workplace has adequate policies in place, an accepting culture often follows. “To me, having my children has always been a bonus that enabled my career to be what it is, and I see now how fortunate I am to know what an enabling environment can look like,” Brown says. “You can tick all the boxes and do all the things, but if you haven’t got that culture that supports and accepts people who are infant feeding, they’re always going to be a step behind.”

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