Child Care Still A Rarity At Meetings

Critics encourage scientific societies to address the needs of women members by accommodating children at professional gatherings Last fall, Miriam Forman, director of professional programs for the American Physical Society, decided to break with tradition. At a major meeting of the society, held last month in Cincinnati, the children of the 2,000 members expected to attend would be as welcome as their parents. Forman contracted a company to run a five-day program for infants and children, ran notices in Physics Today, the monthly journal published by the society's parent organization, the American Institute of Physics, and waited for the applications to roll in. But only two people signed up for the program, and she was forced to cancel the service. Candace King Sykes has unhappy memories as a child of the scientific meetings she attended with her father, a corrosion engineer. "I was bored to tears because we had to sit in our hotel room all day and watch TV," says Sykes, who is now a civil engineer with young children in the San Francisco Bay area. Two years ago, the Society of Women Engineers, meeting in Oakland, decided for the first time to offer child care to members. And Sykes, who volunteered to run the $75, three-day children's program, says she was determined that history would not repeat itself. With the help of three teenagers and one other adult, she loaded the 15 boys and girls, ranging in age from five to 14, onto a school bus and took them on field trips in the Bay area. She says her goal was to teach them as much as their mothers were learning in the convention halls. "My program was like a kids' convention, because I tied it into science," she says. "Face it, the kids of scientists are going to be pretty bright, and they don't want to be bored." On the first day, the group visited the local aquarium, where Sykes had arranged to have a scientist talk to the children about his research with penguin hatchlings. The next day the children went to the famed Exploratorium, the interactive science museum established in 1969 by Frank Oppenheimer. The kids set out to discover science first-hand on the final day with the aid of a geophysicist on loan from the United States Geological Survey. They actually straddled two geological plates as the scientist told them about plate tectonics and pointed out fault lines. Sykes acknowledges that the program took a good deal of planning and energy on her part. But she's convinced that it was well worth the effort. "I knew scientists' kids would be interested in science, and they loved it," says Sykes. "In every region of the country there is something interesting you can do, whether it's touring a power plant or visiting a recording studio. The important thing is that it all ties into science." --D.M. "I absolutely believe there are people who need child care," says Forman. "But this society has such a reputation of ignoring women that it will take a while to change people's perception." Only a few scientific societies have tried to accommodate the needs of members with young children, say advocates of child care, and that indifference is symptomatic of the organizations' inability to recognize the needs of the growing number of women within their ranks. Only 6.5 percent of the members of APS are women. But a recent survey found that 44 percent of them are married to other physicists. That fact, says Forman, creates a situation in which both parents tend to be attracted to the same meetings, and causes the dilemma of how to take care of the children. Across disciplines, there are also more female scientists today than ever before who are likely to be juggling both a new career and a young family. The number of working scientists and engineers who are women has jumped from 9 percent in 1978 to 16 percent a decade later. Meeting organizers at several scientific societies contacted by The Scientist say that high costs and a lack of member interest are the prime reasons that they do not offer child care at their meetings. Members who ask about it are generally referred to the hotel where the meeting is being held, or told to make their own arrangements. In either case, say advocates of child care, the message is clear: Children are excess baggage in the life of a working scientist. The prestigious Gordon Research Conferences, held each summer at prep schools across New England, offer an example of that clash of values. Last year Geraldine Richmond, an associate professor of chemistry at the University of Oregon, was invited to speak at one of the conferences. A workaholic, Richmond had returned to her lab two days after the birth of her son in 1989. But she was also committed to breastfeeding him for a year. For Richmond, the conflict arose when she received a brochure from the conference announcing, in bold red letters, that children under the age of 12 were not welcome inside the conference rooms, the dormitories, and the dining area. Although he says he is sympathetic to scientists with babies, conference director Alexander Cruikshank says state child-care regulations and the low demand from parents keep him from providing babysitters at the conferences. Most important, he says, allowing children in the meetings and dining halls is not fair to the other scientists who have come to work. "If someone wants to take a baby to a meeting in a knapsack, we just have to tell them no," he says. "Children are welcome, as long as they are not sleeping in the same building, meeting in the same building, or eating in the same building." For her part, Richmond believes that the conference's policy is out of step with the times. "They continue to believe that children are entirely out of place," she says. "They will help you out if you call up, but they do it under the table. When I showed up, they said they'd found a sitter and a place for us to sleep. But it was too late: I'd left him at home and, as a result, I had to leave the conference early." At the same time, there are a few societies who have decided to help working mothers. The American Psychological Association, the American Society for Microbiology, and the Society of Women Engineers, for instance, take care of from eight to 200 children while their parents attend lectures and meetings. The reasons these scientific groups have succeeded in providing care, however, seem to have as much to do with the determination and imagination of the child care providers (see Close-Up) as with the number of female members. APA's program, established in 1977, is one of the oldest and largest in the field. Last year APA rented 12 hotel rooms and hired a staff of 40 to care for roughly 200 children, from eight-month-olds to teenagers. Nearly two-fifths of the association's 70,000 full members are women, but officials say the large number of women is not the only reason they offer babysitting. "The philosophy of APA is to make the convention accessible to everyone," says Candy Won, APA's director of convention and meeting services. "Just as we would be sure a hotel has ramps for the handicapped, we provide for women who might not otherwise be able to attend." Child care is a money-losing operation for APA, according to Won. Although the amount varies according to the type of child-care services offered, many societies recoil at the possibility of any subsidy. "I get calls six to eight times a year from associations," says Adelle Cox, whose Miami-based organization provides day care for APA. "But when they find out the cost, they are not interested. There is no way the parents could ever pay for it." The parents' fees cover one-quarter of the $22,000 Cox charges, Won says, and APA picks up the rest. Cox says that the service would be less expensive if it did not accept infants, who require extra staff and specialized equipment. Many officials of organizations that don't provide child care at meetings cite the cost of liability insurance as an important reason. Those costs seem to vary, however, and organizations that do provide babysitting say either that their insurance companies do not charge them significantly more or that they are willing to swallow the expense. When the American Chemical Society investigated child care five years ago, the first concern was the cost, especially of liability insurance, society officials say. But that turned out not to be the real stumbling block. "The board of directors decided they were willing to pick up the tab if we could guarantee a strong need," says Kathleen Trahanovsky, a chemist at Iowa State University who is chairman of the Women Chemists Committee of ACS. "But when we did a survey at meetings and sent out questionnaires through the newsletter, we got very little response." As a result, ACS decided not to provide babysitting to its 140,000 members. "My guess is that the reason there was so little demand for child care is because there are so few chemists out there who have kids," she says. Female members, who make up 15 percent of the ACS rolls, are far less likely than male members to have children, she points out. "Women don't persist in chemistry because the demands on a fresh Ph. D. come during her prime childbearing years. So either they drop out or they decide not to have children." Trahanovsky does not see lack of child care as a big enough issue to be of interest to most scientists, male or female. "It hampers a few individual scientists," Trahanovsky says. "But it's the kind of thing that when it's not offered, people make other arrangements. They find someone in the hotel or they bring a caretaker. "These are working meetings, not vacations. So there's not the appeal of taking the family along and making a vacation of it." For many young women, however, taking an infant to a scientific meeting is not their idea of a vacation, either. But their child-care options are limited. The result is a clash of cultures, in which older scientists may see the presence of children as inappropriate at working meetings. Their younger colleagues, often women who are breastfeeding or are faced with leaving young children at home for five days, also want to work, but not at the expense of their children. They are the graduate students and young researchers who are swelling the ranks of female scientists. And though these women are the ones most likely to be having children, they have not yet developed the clout to change ingrained attitudes. "The number of women in a society is not what's important" in determining whether an association will offer day care, says Barbara Peterson, whose Sitters Limited in Washington, D.C., has been providing day care at conventions for five years. "It's the number of old farts sitting on the board of directors." When child care is provided at meetings, the parents are usually expected to cover a bill that is higher than they would have to pay at home. "In many institutions, when you submit for travel expenses, you are not allowed to submit for child care," says Louise Antony, a professor of philosophy and religion at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, and a member of the Committee on the Status of Women of the American Philosophical Association. "When you travel you incur extraordinary expenses, so they cover things like food. But the assumption is that you [are a man and] can leave the child with your wife." Whether a scientific society provides child care probably doesn't mean a lot in the larger scheme of social issues, many scientists agree. But the small issue of child care may offer a keyhole view into some more important problems, they say. "This is not a big issue," says chemist Trahanovsky. "It's just indicative of the fact it's much more difficult to be a woman chemist. I had a letter from a woman who said that, when it was decided who in her lab would go to the annual meeting, it was just assumed she couldn't because she had kids." A woman may not abandon her career just because she can't get day care at a meeting, says Trahanovsky. But the profession's failure to recognize the dual responsibilities of many woman scientists can have more severe ramifications, she says. "The crisis occurs when a young chemist is expected to work 60 or 70 hours a week in the lab and go back on weekends," she says. "This is not compatible with having children." Organization officials who are trying to provide day care at their meetings say they don't expect their actions to change the world for working parents. APS conference organizers say they are simply determined to keep offering child care until APS loses its reputation as a tradition-bound institution. "What the APS is trying to do is marvelous," says Oregon's Richmond. "I just hope they make it."

Child Care Still A Rarity At Meetings

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