Work-Life Balance: New Policies at the National Science Foundation

NSF Implements Policies Promoting Work Life Balance

You may know that in addition to blogging, I work at a university.  Most of my time is spent doing public health research, but I also teach and mentor students at the university.  I am very lucky that I choose a career in which I have a lot of interest and passion.  My work is quite rewarding, and it also challenges me intellectually.  I learn new things every day and feel that work that I do makes a difference in people’s lives.

Although I have a wonderful career, I find that it is sometimes tough to balance my work with the rest of my life.  In addition to pursuing my career, I have a child and my husband also works full time.  As I wrote in a recent post, families where both parents work often have little free time for other things.  Lack of work life balance can definitely be a source of stress.

Working as an academic has its challenges.  Many academics support their research through grant funding, which in our current economy is difficult to obtain.  As one of these academics, I write a lot of grants.  As I mentioned recently, writing grants is a very time consuming effort.  Also, an academic career is also one that is difficult to “turn off” at the end of the day as you are constantly thinking of new ideas, next steps on projects, and teaching.  The most difficult time of my career was in the first two years following the birth of my child.  The combination of a lack of maternity leave, inadequate day care options, and frequent sickness in my family made it difficult to have any life at all.

The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) has recently launched an initiative to assist working families where one or both parents holds careers in science and engineering.  In describing their initiative, the NSF provide a number a statistics that indicate that married women and women with children in are unlikely to advance to more senior positions in academics when compared to unmarried women and women without children.  Among other things, the NSF’s new initiative will increase the flexibility in grants that are awarded and will encourage family friendly policies for career programs sponsored by NSF.

I find it encouraging that NSF is concerned that families with two working parents have difficulty balancing everything.  I also find it positive that they would like to prevent career attrition from one segment of their highly trained workforce–women with families.   Often a new policy or law can lead to significant changes (just think of how many people wear seat belts now that there are so many states that require seat belts to be worn in cars).

But I also feel that there are other changes that will have to be made at institutions, in communities, and within society to really impact these work life difficulties faced by families.  For instance, changes to NSF policies would not improve the lack of high quality day care in my community.

What do you think are the best ways to support workers who have are trying to balance work with family life?