{"id":158276,"date":"2026-09-18T14:49:27","date_gmt":"2026-09-18T12:49:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/diaridigital.urv.cat\/?p=158276"},"modified":"2026-09-30T14:49:45","modified_gmt":"2026-09-30T12:49:45","slug":"quality-time-for-research-after-becoming-a-mother","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/diaridigital.urv.cat\/en\/quality-time-for-research-after-becoming-a-mother\/","title":{"rendered":"Quality time for research after becoming a mother"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gender gaps in research and innovation are not only caused by jobs, working hours or types of contract, but are also evident in research and innovation outcomes such as the number of publications or patents by a researcher. These are the findings of the report “Gender in Research” by the European Institute for Gender Equality<\/a> of the European Commission, which describes how this bias has consequences for women who are trying to obtain grants, awards and jobs within the research and innovation system. And the research activity of women is particularly affected by the arrival of children due to the commitments of motherhood and breastfeeding.<\/p>\n

Carlota Moragas, a professor in the Department of Communication, illustrates this as follows: “The major change that motherhood brings to the day-to-day lives of female researchers is the drastic reduction in the time that, before becoming mothers, we were able to dedicated to developing our academic careers beyond the hours stipulated in our contracts.”<\/p>\n

Because of this situation, the Universitat Rovira i Virgili has implemented measures to reduce inequalities for women pursuing academic careers. One of the most significant is the research intensification programme, approved in 2019, which allows academic staff who have taken maternity leave to reduce their teaching load by 100% for one semester at any time during the three years after the birth of their child. In this way, they have a whole semester which they can dedicate exclusively to research, thus mitigating the impact that maternity can have on their professional progression.<\/p>\n

“The key is that the University covers the cost of finding a replacement teacher, thus preventing the burden from falling on the rest of the teaching staff,” explains Cilia Willem, director of the URV’s Equality Unit. While “one semester does not solve the problem,” Willem concedes, “it is an incentive” that helps to reduce the imbalance. Thirty-five female professors have taken advantage of the measure since it was introduced in 2020.<\/p>\n

Leticia Bazo, a professor in the Department of Nursing, describes what it meant for her to be able to take advantage of this measure: “It was a real turning point, it gave me quality time to research. That semester allowed me to resume the timeline of my projects, write scientific articles, prepare competitive calls, coordinate with participating centres and consolidate different lines of applied research in neonatology, paediatrics and educational technology. I was also able to strengthen the transfer of knowledge to healthcare centres and advance initiatives that, with the usual teaching workload, would probably have been postponed.” At the same time, on a personal level, she says she was able to enjoy “irreplaceable time with my children.”<\/p>\n

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Leticia Bazo, a neonatology expert, preparing for a simulation exercise at a conference with one of her children in her arms.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As Willem points out, “stopping for sixteen weeks after the birth of a child can have long-term consequences, because it can take between three and five years for a researcher to go from having a project idea, making it happen, and then publishing the results.”<\/p>\n

As for researchers who have not yet consolidated their careers, they may experience delays in acquiring the necessary qualifications to apply for new posts, while those who are already established compete at a disadvantage compared to other candidates. Similarly, performance-related pay bonuses and opportunities to take on leadership roles in research can be affected.<\/p>\n

Moragas had a son and a daughter during the period she was a lecturer, the first stage of a research career. She believes that being able to “opt out of teaching for two semesters during this period was fundamental because it allowed me to dedicate more time to research, which is essential for obtaining accreditation, and to preparing my application for an associate professor post.”<\/p>\n

Measures for equal opportunities in the academic career<\/h5>\n

The research intensification programme is part of a broader institutional policy to ensure equal opportunities for academics. One of the measures adopted in recent years is the provision of a room in the workplace where mothers go to breastfeed their children, thus meaning they can get back to work earlier, explains Willem.<\/p>\n

“Choosing to breastfeed entails a series of challenges that go beyond meeting the baby’s feeding and care needs because they have a direct impact on time and work organisation, especially during the first few months of life,” explains Moragas, who used the room on the Catalunya campus with her daughter and sees the differences compared with when she was feeding her son.\u00a0“It has made a substantial difference in helping me get back to work and in allowing me to continue breastfeeding. I was also able to continue expressing milk to donate to the Milk Bank for premature babies.”<\/p>\n

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Carlota Moragas with her daughter in the University’s breastfeeding room.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In terms of regulations, there are criteria which state that, in the event of a tie for a specific teaching post, the under-represented gender will be given preference. There are also mechanisms to neutralise the effect of maternity and paternity leave on the calculation of a professor\u2019s academic track record. For biological mothers, 183 days per child are deducted when calculating the time elapsed between their appointment and obtaining the necessary qualifications, and for other parents, the time corresponding to the leave actually taken is deducted. Officially, in the assessment of teaching activity, reductions resulting from maternity, paternity or childcare leave are also recognised, and female doctoral candidates who become mothers while writing their thesis can be granted extensions.<\/p>\n

Leticia Bazo and Carlota Moragas agree that the biases in work-life balance have less to do with being male or female, but rather with family models and the role each person assumes, which determines how much time each person spends raising children and how much they spend on work.<\/p>\n

Bazo stresses that while “motherhood inevitably changes the pace of a research career”, aspects such as “flexibility in organising teaching and the possibility of having spaces for autonomous work ” allow “one to remain involved in research without having to give up motherhood”.\u00a0In this context, the work culture is crucial. Moragas details how the support from the people at the head of her Department and from her colleagues in her research group has helped her to keep up the pace of her research activity and to not be sidelined during the early years of raising her children.<\/p>\n

“The challenge \u2013 says Bazo \u2013 is not to prove that we can do more, but to build working environments that allow us to develop our research careers without having to give up on starting a family.” Motherhood, after all, “helps us to understand that professional careers are not always linear, and that this does not make them any less valuable.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

35 female professors have taken advantage of a programme designed to reduce the impact of motherhood on their academic careers. It grants them a semester without teaching duties so they can devote themselves exclusively to research after the birth of a child<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":54,"featured_media":156619,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3470,3474,804,789,249,82,229,818,195,178,235,796],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-158276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-communication-studies","category-nursing","category-equality","category-faculty-arts","category-faculty-nursing","category-general-en","category-institution","category-press-releases","category-research","category-science-technology","category-society-culture","category-pdi-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaridigital.urv.cat\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaridigital.urv.cat\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaridigital.urv.cat\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaridigital.urv.cat\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/54"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaridigital.urv.cat\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=158276"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/diaridigital.urv.cat\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158276\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaridigital.urv.cat\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/156619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaridigital.urv.cat\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=158276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaridigital.urv.cat\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=158276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaridigital.urv.cat\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=158276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}