Today is my last day at home. On Monday I'll be back at work, after 8 months of parental leave.
I'm excited to be back in the office, and I'm happy that I got to spent these months so intensively with our little one.
Some thoughts. /begin{thread}
I'm excited to be back in the office, and I'm happy that I got to spent these months so intensively with our little one.
Some thoughts. /begin{thread}
First, I'm grateful to my husband, who will be on parental leave for the next 4.5 months. It'll be much easier to be at work knowing that our son is with somebody who loves him so much. Also, him being the main carer will be incredibly valuable for his relationship with our son.
I'm also grateful to live in Germany, where the state pays up to 1800€ (2000$) a month to the parent who stays at home with the baby (for up to 14 months), and where the employer is legally obliged to grant up to three years of leave after having a kid.
As an academic, I was in the lucky situation that I got tenure quite early (at 29), and thus didn't have to worry about how a kid would affect my research output. Now that Germany is switching to a tenure-track system, fewer people will be in this happy situation.
While the German system needs modernisation, I think we're paying too little attention that tenure track can also prolong uncertainty, making it even more difficult for women.
Parental leave for an academic is not the same thing as for someone in industry. My husband's email account will be closed so that he can't work while on leave. I spent almost every nap working, esp. mentoring my PhD students and responding to emails.
Friends told me that during parental leave they finally got to read books they had planned to read. I figured out how to write emails with a baby sleeping on my lap.
The reactions to our choices of parental leave were illuminating. I got a few "oh, so short, only 8 months?!", my husband many "wow, so long, 4.5 months!", often followed with "don't you worry it will hurt your career?"
Nobody worried about my career. Perhaps they didn't care, perhaps they thought that parental leave only hurts mens' careers.
There is a lot of discrimination here - my husband was basically told by his boss that taking 4.5 months is a terribly idea career-wise, while a female colleague (at the same level of seniority) announced that she will take twelve month of parental leave at the same meeting, ..
.. without negative comments. We talk a lot about the wage penalty for🚺 after birth, but 🚹 taking a longish parental leave get much more pushback. Several junior male colleagues of my huband told him they were grateful, as he was forming a path that they could thus follow later
36% of German fathers take any parental leave; 60% of those who take it take two months. This shows the importance of anchor points - a couple gets a total of 14 months (instead of 12 months) of paid parental leave if each partner takes at least two months.
This also shows options for reform - perhaps if we paid more if the leave was split more equally, it would be shared more equally.
Many told us it's great we're splitting parental leave equally. We're not. I was at home twice as long as my husband, and I'll get our son started in nursery. We decided together that this was the best split, but it's interesting to see how it is perceived from the outside.
In all, having a baby and spending time with him is the most rewarding thing I've ever done. It's way more fun (and way more tiring) than I could have imagined. I love to see how our little one explores the world, how he learns new things every day, ...
how he smiles when he sees me enter the room, how he snuggles up to me when he's tired. I just wish he'd figure out how to sleep for more than 2-4 hours at a time. 😊🤷🏻♀️
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