Taking parental leave as a PI  

What type of parental leave did you choose to take and why?
So I chose to take shared parental leave of two periods, each of one month of leave. One month at the start so I could be there to help out when both me and my partner were new to parenthood and then one period six months in, which I’m yet to take, but we can be flexible about the dates. Partly to allow me to spend some more time at a different stage in development, but also to perhaps give my partner a bit of a break by then, and to also help out when my son will be likely to be moving on to solid foods and it’s a more appropriate time to give that sort of help.

Why was a postdoc crucial to your parental leave?
So in terms of shared parental leave, there was certainly challenges and opportunities in the university. The biggest benefit and reassuring thing is that anyone that I talked to, whether it was in my department, or school, or HR about taking shared parental [leave], is that there was a lot of will to support me and a lot of people that would like me to do it, so there was a lot of encouragement. What there wasn’t very much of was precedent of academics taking shared parental leave, so we didn’t have a lot of best practice about how it could work. Now, in the past, there weren’t many people that had taken shared parental leave but when they had the standard practice seemed to largely be, “well just do the best you can”. There wasn’t any track record for having cover, of someone taking over what would be my position while I wasn’t there.

So in terms of shared parental leave, there was certainly challenges and opportunities in the university. The biggest benefit and reassuring thing is that anyone that I talked to, whether it was in my department, or school, or HR about taking shared parental [leave], is that there was a lot of will to support me and a lot of people that would like me to do it, so there was a lot of encouragement. What there wasn’t very much of was precedent of academics taking shared parental leave, so we didn’t have a lot of best practice about how it could work. Now, in the past, there weren’t many people that had taken shared parental leave but when they had the standard practice seemed to largely be, “well just do the best you can”. There wasn’t any track record for having cover, of someone taking over what would be my position while I wasn’t there.

Now, in terms of that, if you don’t have cover it was meaning that what was happening is that the work of my role, both the teaching and the supervising research students, it would mean that a lot of the teaching would be taken on by colleagues, so you have other people shouldering the burden of the work that you’re not doing. And in terms of supervising the research students, it would be a combination of me still doing the work, but from home, or coming in occasionally, so doing the work even though you’re on leave, or just the supervision not happening and the students doing without.

Now from my point of view, that system seemed like something that would discourage people from taking shared parental leave, because if I were to do that then there’s a combination of guilt that other people are having to take on my work, and worry about the work that isn’t being done. So what we’re able to do is – I did sort of ask the university about taking on some cover and the question I was asked was, “well how will that work if we just need someone to cover you for a month because it’s just going to be too challenging to get someone external in?” Now, from that point of view we have the benefit of postdocs because we have a lot of excellent postdocs and some of them exactly at the career stage where they are wanting, and ready, to move from postdoc to lectureship position. So what made sense was to take on a postdoc to fill my position for a month.

Now when that happened, it’s the benefit to me and my fellow lecturers that they’re then taking on that teaching responsibility and the benefit to my group that there is then still someone supervising them in my absence and giving them the advice and the guidance they need, but from my position it really helped me not to be as worried about, well what isn’t getting done while I’m not there? So I could really enjoy the time that I was off, spending it with my son rather than stressing about what wasn’t being done. And then for the postdocs themselves, obviously they’re at a career stage where they want to get experience of teaching and they want to get experience of supervision and running a research group because that is exactly the job they want to apply to next. So for them [the postdoc], doing that for that month gives them the ideal experience that’s going to help them in their applications.

How did you find coming back to work?
I found coming back to work after the month off certainly a sharp change. It was difficult in that after having the longest period off since, I guess before I started my PhD, you know, got a little out of the habit of things and there was a difficulty of remembering, well, what was I even doing before I went off? Because it had been quite a different month, but at the same time a lot of it came back to me quite quickly and I think I came back to a lot of the work that I was doing with perhaps a renewed vigour. Because, similar to being off on a holiday – now I’m not comparing parental leave to a holiday, there’s a lot of nappies to change and not a lot of sleep and all the rest of it, but a change it certainly is, it’s very different to doing academic teaching and research. So having had that time doing something completely different, it meant I could go back to work with perhaps an interest in it that had been ebbing a little without having [had] such a break for such a long time. So I think actually going back, I was enjoying it more and I was working better after I came back.

What does your work-life balance look like now?
I’d say parenthood has probably changed how I balance my work and life and priorities. Not in terms of what I would aspire to do, I always had the aspiration that I would get as much work done in work time and then free up some time to have a work-life balance, but there was a time when I’d want to do that but it wouldn’t always happen and the work would leak into the rest of the time. It certainly made me have that cut-off a lot more sharply because it isn’t a question of, “well, I’d like to get this done by X o’clock because then I’d like to have the rest of the evening off”. It’s now more the case of, “well, that’s going to happen or it isn’t, but either way I’m not doing any work after a certain point because I’ve got other things to do”.

What advice would you give to a researcher thinking about taking parental leave?
So the advice I’d give anyone considering taking parental leave, particularly in terms of researchers and academics, I would definitely recommend that if they’re considering it [taking parental leave] then they should stop considering it and start doing it, I think they will be better off for doing it. If they’re concerned about losing any time away from work, I think we’re going to get the systems in place that there shouldn’t be a detriment to them for doing it.

So what should happen is, if they take the leave, the benefit of them having the leave is they should go back to work better able to work, because rather than trying to work at the same time as having those nights with little sleep and trying to take the time to interact with their child and work at the same time and therefore working badly, they take the time off, do that properly and then go back to work with a renewed vigour. But we don’t want anyone to feel like, “I’d like to take shared parental leave but I can’t because if I do it will damage my career, my prospects, my research”. So any concerns that you have, talk to your line manager, talk to your supervisor, talk to your HR representative and say, “I want to take shared parental leave, what systems can be put in place so that I’m not disadvantaged by having done so?”