The years when Steve and I wrote our dissertations were lean and hungry. I would periodically go looking around for grant money to help ease the pain, but I always came up empty.
Many of the grants were targeted towards very specific populations or research topics. I don’t begrudge those groups that benefited from those awards, but I am noting that there were few grants for white Jersey girls with a great sense of style. Go figure.
The few that I was eligible for required that the money go to very specific purposes, which also fell outside the bounds of my research. Most of them expected that the money would go to expenses incurred while conducting huge survey research and crunching large numbers. I’m perfectly capable of doing quantitative research, but the questions that my dissertation explored required interviews and archival research. (I would love to know if there is a gender gap between quantitative and qualitative research. I bet there is.) There was no funding for qualitative research. My expenses here were admittedly not huge, some travel expenses to Pennsylvania and Ohio, and my department helped covered some of that.
My biggest expense while doing the dissertation was the lack of any real income. If you’re working all day for free on your dissertation, there’s no money coming in pay for rent and food. Few grants provide enough help to pay for your rent. My folks and the student loan people helped out here.
Another huge expense for us was daycare. We had a one year old at the time. Though we made excellent use of nap time, we still needed some daycare. Another expense that no grant covered. At the time, I made a big stink about this at the playground.
Why women drop out of grad school.
That is that why I cheered when I read this article about a former Nobel Prize winner who is championing the cause to have academic grants that are specifically targeted towards paying the babysitter. Fine idea.
Apt. 11d 
Like you, my topic did not merit funding. Studying the intersection of technology and politics, doesn’t merit grant money. My adviser would periodically ask, “When are you going to finish? What’s taking you so long?” Uhhh, I have to work. Without grant money, student loans only go so far. I would like to extend the grant money to single as well women too. One study I read, reported that marrieds make it through grad school much more quickly than singles. There has to be a better way to award grant money–not just by the topic one studies. What about by income?
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Amen sister,
I am 31 and finishing up. I put off kids becuase husband was in the same boat. At a party the other day a woman my age but just starting asked me for advice about when she should have kids. I didn’t know what to tell her other than – um, write real fast then do it. But that’s a hell of a gamble at our age given how unpredictable dissertations can be (esp. if you are a lazy ass like myself.)
Also I think that you are absolutely right about the real cost being the absence of an income – not the expenses of our lifestyles. That’s what guts you financially.
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That was a great article–thanks for pointing it out. I think she’s very pragmatic on the issue: the point is not to say that husbands should help out, but that we should pay people to do work that will help us do our work. (This was in the video, I think.)
I realize that some people will take issue with this because they believe that the mother should be with the child (this is also something that Nussler-Volhard points out and dismisses). Yet, I just want to point out, as I have many times on these types of posts, that my mother went back to work when I was 6 months old. I had a nanny that cared for me all day until my mother came home at 6pm. I NEVER begrudged my mother for it, and I was proud of her for (a) living a life she enjoyed and (b) making the money to make our family have a comfortable living. I hope to follow in her footsteps.
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I don’t think that universities haven’t funded babysitter, because they think that children should be raised by their mothers. I think they just don’t have a clue. If the husband is watching the kid, then who’s earning money? Raising kids and writing dissertations earn zero dollars, as my social security statement will attest. And both take enormous amounts of time.
I do think that grants are needed to cover all sorts of necessary life expenses, childcare being one example. Universities also have to help their students pay the rent and keep out of enormous amounts of debt.
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Very interesting article, although I wouldn’t be able to get the grant, since I am in the humanities.
I had both of my sons while my husband and I were in graduate school (I still am – I’m ABD, working on the diss right now) – we had assistanships (him RA and me TA), though, and full health insurance as well as tuition waivers, which allowed us to survive without loans. The university even had an excellent day care, which I didn’t have to use due to our flexible schedules.
My husband got a postdoc two years ago, right after our second son was born and we moved. We can survive on only his sallary (it’s a bit more than what we did with both assistanships), but if I didn’t have my parents, who have come from Brazil twice now to spend many months caring for my boys while I work on the dissertation, I’d probably remain an ABD forever and ever.
In that sense, a grant like that would allow me to have some childcare so I can work on the diss. My parents are returning to Brazil in a month and I don’t know how I’ll manage to revise and turn in the dissertation, ’cause we can’t afford any kind of care.
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The university where I work actually has a flexible parental child care grant for student parents, scaled to income, and with special accomodations for children with special needs who cannot attend a day care. The world is changing, one Graduate School at a time!
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In German science, we have a special problem. We lose talented women at the time they get pregnant. Some of it occurs because they are encouraged — by their husbands, bosses and the government — to take long maternity leaves.
Germanic thinking has it that children can only be properly brought up if the actual mother is cleaning and picking up. Many stop their research for two or three years. Later, these young women find it difficult to get back. They drop out.
Sigh. Throwing money at the problem is effective in the short-term, but what about addressing the problem in “Germanic thinking” (which is, sadly, far more interational than she seems to realize)?
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The incident that sealed my fate, so to speak, was loss of childcare for my youngest child (then two). I feel that I could have handled 2 out of 3 challenges: lack of money, lack access to resources and support (library, advisor, other grad. students, writing center) and lack of time. With childcare, I had trouble with resources and money (I wasn’t earning any b/c I wasn’t able to TA, since I didn’t have a TAship, I also didn’t qualify for a tuition remission, we also had to pay for childcare), but at least I had time. Once childcare fell through the obstacles seemed insurmountable.
The main problem I encountered in grad. school was that the entire process took so long. I found it infantilizing and I wasn’t willing to continue to postpone my “adult life” indefinitely. I took every risk there was and, not surprisingly, I didn’t finish my degree! First I got pregnant, then we moved away, then we bought a house that needed a lot of work and had another baby. Nuts! I was 28 when I had my first baby though, hardly a young mother! Perhaps my luck has changed as I’ll be starting a tenure-track job this fall just in time for my youngest to start school and my husband will have some flexibility in his work schedule. I don’t know what my chances will be for tenure, but I also acquired a teaching license along the way so I have a back-up plan.
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What if we thought bigger and tried to turn conservative vouchers arguments to our favor when it coms to pre-K education? Cf. my side of the vouchers debate at Objectivist v. Constructivist for more.
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Some tool suggested a few years back – I’ve lost the reference, so I don’t know whether it was here in Australia or in the US – that students should be penalised for completing degrees in greater than a certain amount of time.
So guess what cohort would make up a lot of those penalised students… Yes, women who care for children.
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