The part-time paradise

My home country is the country in Europe where most people work part-time. Nearly half of the workforce (both male and female) work part-time (meaning less than 38 hours a week). And if that is broken down for gender you can see that 75% of women work part-time.

Source. I couldn't find this figure in English, but the X-axis shows the percentage of working people, and my homecountry is the longest blue line all the way at the bottom.

You might say: ‘Oh nice, there are so many jobs that people can do part-time and they get to spend more time with their family’. True, but the downside of this is that daycare providers often also work part-time. This means that if you are one of those few mothers that want to work full-time, you will almost certainly put your child in a daycare where it does not have one steady care provider, but different ones for almost every day, making it much harder for your child to form a bond with their care provider. 

And that is not even the worst part of it. Because the reality is that because so many women work part-time, it is almost seen as a crime when you have children and decide to work full-time. Almost no child goes to a daycare 5 days a week, and if you ask if that’s a possibility, the answer we got was:”I guess, if you insist”. I won’t even get started about the judgmental looks and comments from other mothers. It is just not done. 

So can you science part-time? I think you can, because as a matter of fact a couple of my mentors from grad school (both men and women) worked four days a week. Some of them worked 4 times 9 hours (technically full-time but with one day to be home with their kids), others worked 4 ‘regular’ days. I’m not saying that these people did not work at nights and on the weekend, because I’m pretty sure most of them did. And I guess in about a year from now (if all goes well, we get some kind of grant, etc etc) we will try for ourselves. Both Dr. BrownEyes and I are considering working 4 days a week, so that BlueEyes and prospective baby can go to daycare 3 days a week, just like their fellow homecountry kids.

Pregnancy and safety in the lab

I do surgeries on rats using isofluorane as anesthetic. This is a gas that the rats breathe in, but because of poor ventilation, the person doing the surgery in our lab also occasionally smells the isofluorane (it has a very distinct smell). When I found out I was pregnant I wasn’t sure if I should still be using isofluorane, so I asked google. Google told me:

“Pregnancy Category CIsoflurane has been shown to have a possible anesthetic-related fetotoxic effect in mice when given in doses 6 times the human dose. There are no adequate and well-controlled studies in pregnant women. Isoflurane should be used during pregnancy only if the potential benefit justifies the potential risk to the fetus.”  

It also told me: 

“Pregnant mice exposed to light doses of isoflurane were found to have an increased frequency of cleft palate, skeletal variations and fetal growth retardation (Mazze et al., 1985). At doses similar to those used in humans, other investigators have not observed teratogenic effects among the offspring of pregnant rats or rabbits treated repeatedly with isoflurane (Kennedy et al., 1977; Mazze et al., 1986). There are no epidemiological studies reporting congenital anomalies in children born to women exposed to isoflurane during pregnancy. Therefore, its risk in human pregnancy remains undetermined.”

Still, from this information I found it very hard to make an informed decision. So I decided not to use isofluorane but instead use injectable anesthesia for my surgeries. The surgeries that I do are also performed under ketamine/xylazine anesthesia, so I think that should be fine. 

However, this whole search for a risk assessment made me realize how hard it is do determine exactly how dangerous something is for you. This is especially important when you’re pregnant (or breastfeeding), but also just for your own health. A friend of mine who also uses isofluorane had her PI tell her when she was pregnant that it was okay for her to use this. I don’t know where the PI found this information, or that ze just really wanted this post-doc to continue her work.

If you ask me, it would be great if there was someone you could ask how dangerous the things are that you encounter on a daily basis in the lab; someone who could tell you what to change when you are pregnant. For radioactivity this is very well documented, but in the lab you encounter so many things for which it is hard to determine the risk using google and common sense. Does this information exist somewhere that I just don’t know about? If not, this should be a thing!

On breastfeeding while pregnant.

Before BlueEyes was born I knew I wanted to give breastfeeding a try, but I didn’t have any particular goals in mind. I first wanted to see how things went and if I could even do it. Shortly after he was born he started nursing and it went surprisingly well. I was very lucky and never really had any problems. No clogged ducts, no mastitis, no nipples that were hurting. It was all smooth sailing. 

Before I had BlueEyes, I thought nursing a toddler, let alone a bigger kid, was a bit weird. I guess it doesn’t help that you rarely see people do it. But your own child becomes a toddler very gradually. So slow that you almost don’t realize that he’s not a little baby anymore. So there is no one day when all of a sudden he is a toddler and you ‘have to’ stop nursing. I’m still breastfeeding BlueEyes, because I really don’t see a good reason not to. What I didn’t realize before is that after about a year you can stop pumping at work, because your breasts slowly turn from milk storage units to milk making units (i.e. you make the most milk during a feeding instead of throughout the day). BlueEyes nurses shortly when we come home from daycare, he nurses (a lot) before he goes to bed, and then when he wakes up at night he nurses to fall back to sleep easily. And he nurses when he’s really upset and angry and when that is really the only way to get him to calm down.

And now I’m pregnant and again, before I had BlueEyes I didn’t even realize that that was a thing: breastfeeding while you’re pregnant. Well, it is. And now you know it too ;-).

What’s in it for me?

My PI got me involved in a collaboration with people who want to do something that I know how to do (and my PI doesn’t really). So I’m helping them as much as I can. Not only do I give them advice, I also help them with practical work because that lab currently consists of only the PI and a technician who works hir ass off for the PI. The PI is pretty pushy and often only asks things at the last minute, so this collaboration has been a good exercise in trying to protect my personal boundaries (read: I’ve been annoyed to no end by all the last-minute requests). 

What I’m not really sure about in these kinds of situations is when you ask what’s in it for you? I asked my PI and he was like:” Yeah of course you’ll be a co-author on their paper.” But so far, we’re gathering preliminary data for a grant, and with the current size of this PI’s lab it might take a while before this turns into a paper.

So how does one go about this? Do you trust that this PI will remember that I helped hir when ze writes the paper years from now? Or do you just ask (or even email so that you have it in writing):”What’s in it for me?”

What is your obligation as a PI?

Say you’re a PI of medium sized lab (or any size, it really doesn’t matter for this question) and you get an offer from a non-academic place to go work there. It’s very tempting because they pay tons of money, and with the difficult time getting grants that sounds like sweet music to your ears. So you take the job, which means your techs, grad students and post-docs don’t have a PI anymore. 

What is your obligation here? The grad students will be taken over by other PIs because the school promised them continuous funding (although it will cost them extra time), but what about the techs and the post-docs? Officially, of course, you probably owe them nothing (or do you?), but in reality what would you do? Do you try to make sure they get somewhere or is that not your problem?

Of course, this is an entirely hypothetical situation. I just wanted to talk about something else than the Boston Marathon bomber for a change.