Re: Maternity Leave Stipends?
- From: Straydog <asd@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 28 Dec 2005 20:12:33 -0500
On Wed, 28 Dec 2005, George Orwell wrote:
Does anyone know the past policy
You're not interested in the _present_ policy?
First, I apologize for the double post. I waited 24 hrs for the first to appear but it didn't. Then, I am interested in the present policy because I've been reading more about it lately. Harvard and a few other places are, apparently, changing their policies ... but I always assumed that the students I knew of (in the past) could not have survived without their stipends and were receiving them, either by law or the generosity of their PI or departments. I NEVER heard stories, 1st, 2nd or >2nd hand, of grad student moms complaining about NOT getting paid or losing stipends or benefits.
Have you asked anyone where you have been before (surely you knew some people, still have some contacts social/academic?)?
It's a touchy subject that I don't raise but a bit relevant to discussions in s.r.c..
I can think of only a very small number of US citizen colleagues who could afford to start a family while in grad school. All were wealthy or well off.
On the other hand, I have dozens of alien colleagues who were able to do so. The vast majority of them had their parents come from overseas to take care of the new baby when the student returned to school. (Typically, one set of gradparents would come over for 6 months, then the other set.) In several cases, the baby was sent back to the homeland to be raised by the grandparents for a few years. (This was/is common within some countries, such as PRChina, so this is just the international version of that.) But now I'm drifting off topic.
I was just wondering what those of you here in s.r.c might know from official, personal, or 2nd hand experience about past policies.
Happy New Year!
As I think back of specific examples (and going back to about 1970), some mother-grad students got back to work within 2 weeks and put the kid in a nursery (yeah, that costs money and in the one case nothing was said about where it came from). I recall relatively few cases of having kids while being a graduate student, but I knew (in '70s) quite a few grad students that were married (in some cases both were in graduate school, in other s one had a full time job supporting the other one). I don't recall much from my post-doc period, but when I was in my first real, full time, PhD-requiring job, there were other (females) people who took time out to have a kid. One was a B.S.-level technician (husband had a hiher paying job) and the arrangement (early '80s) was she would get her job back if she
came back within a year. As it turned out, she decided, after one year, to
not come back. Another case, a PhD line staff took time out to have a kid and she read up on laws, etc., to learn her rights and part of the deal there was that if she took time off, then she had to use up her sick leave, then her annual leave, and then it was going to be docked pay for any time after that and she was pissed. There was noise. She had a husband with a better job, too. In the end, she came back to work after a moderate amount of time (a few years later there was a big political blow up [not involving the kid] and she left the institution, too). The third case
was also a PhD postdoc who had a kid and took some period of time off (she
had a husband who was a major corporation VP and she didn't need her job)
to have a kid, and, again, after some period of time I'm not clearly
recalling, she decided to drop out of the labor force and be a
full-time mom.
One example where my own one PhD-seeking graduate student (I was the major advisor) had a wife who was also seeking a PhD, and they were on support, and while doing their dissertation work decided to have a kid some months before the degree was conferred. I don't recall that they had a lot of trouble but with a flexible schedule (because of dissertation research) one could cover for the other and vice versa. I don't recall them talking about difficulties.
These examples are real but I think don't help you with the question of what happens when the involved people don't have the resources (like my examples). Yes, I've heard the same thing about getting the grand parents involved (either by having them come over for an extended visit, or just ship the kid back to the country of origin in the hands of relatives). In the little bits that I did pick up on, most of the arrangements were made either according to institutional policy or by verbal arrangement with the boss/PI/whatever. I'm sure that if work came to a stop for an extended period of time, or work did not resume with full efforts, then there would be trouble.
I would say that in the cases that I knew about, most foreign-born students, postdocs, etc., came from better families with more resources and more encouragement and definitely more support including moral support and visitations.
You may also want to look into some of the books that have dealt with survival under poverty conditions: "Nickle & Dimed" by barbara Ehrenreich, and that whole genre for how people "network" to help each other out. eg. More than one family per appartment cuts the rent in half.
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