Deciding whether or not to attend a conference always involves a careful weighing of options. Does the chance to disseminate your research, get feedback, meet colleagues, start collaborations and engage in networking outweigh the time away and cost? Recently, this discussion has broadened to include the environmental cost of air travel, which has also been causing scientists to reconsider conference travel (Langin, 2019). Choosing whether to attend a conference can be particularly challenging for early-career investigators. Gaining visibility is critical, with some institutions even requiring conference attendance for promotion, but conference travel may mean dipping into a limited start-up fund or spending time away from a fledgling laboratory. If you are a parent, the decision is even more complicated.

If you decide to attend a conference, the next decision you need to make is if you will bring your child(ren) or leave them at home. For some parents, especially ones who are not primary caregivers or who have family or other caregivers nearby, leaving children at home may be the most obvious and easiest choice. For others, including single parents, lactating parents, parents of a child with a disability, parents who share caregiving with a working partner, or whose partner is attending the same conference, leaving children at home may be challenging or impossible. Furthermore, some parents simply do not want to spend much time away from their children. It is important to remember that only certain academics, most often women, have to make this choice, so making either option as easy as possible is a critical step towards inclusivity – which in turn, leads to better science (Nielsen et al., 2017).

If you are bringing your child to a conference, the basic logistics that everyone has to deal with (flights, hotel, transportation and meals) become more complicated, and you also have to worry about childcare. Below I discuss some considerations for each.

I do not want to give the impression that attending conferences with your child (or children) is all negative. You get to experience new places with your child, give them a taste of your awesome job, and help normalize parenthood in academia. However, for many parents, choosing to attend conferences can feel like giving much more (financially and otherwise) for what will most likely be a watered-down version of the event.

It is easy to see why some parents may decide to just skip conference travel altogether, especially when many academic parents are early-career researchers, who often have limited financial resources. In short, the cost and flexibility required for traveling with children is incompatible with the rigid guidelines for claiming back expenses put in place by the universities and funders. This stacks the deck against academic parents, and disproportionately affects women, since biology, cultural and societal norms mean that they more often have to choose to bring their child with them or not travel at all. These same considerations are further compounded for academics with limited financial resources, meaning that some of the most vulnerable and under-represented groups in academia are most impacted.

The burden should not be on parents to figure out how to survive in a culture that was not built for them

Besides giving yourself space for self-care and attending conferences that support you, I do not have a game-changing suggestion for parents that will solve the challenges of traveling to conferences with small children. But I don’t think I should have to propose these solutions. The burden should not be on parents to figure out how to survive in a culture that was not built for them. Instead, it is time to change that culture.

Small things can be done to help. Conferences can include free or subsidized childcare and family-friendly spaces (Calisi and A Working Group of Mothers in Science, 2018; Langin, 2018), and universities can provide travel grants to parents to cover the additional costs of work-related travel with children (Bos et al., 2018). Funding agencies can offer similar grants or at least reimburse childcare and the travel costs of children and caregivers. Additionally, rules for allowable expenses could loosen restrictions on hotel reimbursement or means of transport. Finally, universities can reconsider requirements for promotion or tenure, offering flexibility for criteria that rely on travel. Such changes would be relatively inexpensive, but could make conference travel far more achievable for parents, making academia a more welcoming and inclusive place.

This Feature Article is part of the Scientist and Parent collection.

1. Received: June 11, 2019
2. Accepted: June 11, 2019
3. Version of Record published: June 14, 2019

© 2019, Swann

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.