It all begins when you are a graduate student

Abstract

In the last several years, much research has touched on maternity and pregnancy in the workplace, including recent attention on how menopause may affect women’s experience at work (e.g., Grandey et al., 2020). In their focal article, Gabriel and colleagues (2022) discuss the importance of taking what we have learned through research and applying it to better support women faculty members. In doing so, they tellingly discuss the lack of support from their institutions, colleagues, and fellow department members. We have no dispute with any of their arguments but want to highlight a separate yet related aspect regarding support for women in academia. Specifically, in this commentary, we (a current graduate student and a faculty member who has been chair of an Industrial/Organization [I/O] Psych and Organizational Behavior doctoral program) suggest that the lack of support for female academics begins well before they assume their first faculty positions. It all begins in graduate school, when the high workload, minimal access to parental leave, limited financial resources, and a lack of access to childcare together communicate that: “Now is not the time to have children!”