Family-friendly academic conferences: a missing link to fix the “leaky pipeline”?

ABSTRACT

Traveling to academic conferences to present research and network is essential for scholars to achieve success in the academy. Scholars with family obligations face barriers to participating in conferences, partly because most regional and national conferences are not organized to be family-friendly. While balancing travel to academic conferences with family responsibilities is a challenge faced by all academics, this burden can be especially high for women. As such, improving the family-friendly features of conferences could be one way to patch the “leaky pipeline” of young female scholars leaving the academy, and facilitate the movement of female faculty through the ranks from Assistant to Associate to Full Professor. We identify these barriers to conference attendance and how they might contribute to the leaky pipeline and share innovations from family-friendly small conferences that minimize these burdens. We also review what the major political science association conferences are doing to be family-friendly, and offer details about further recommended changes. Finally, we highlight one exemplary institutional policy and examples from other disciplines. Our conclusion is that there are many simple and affordable ways to make political science conferences more family-friendly and that these changes are necessary to creating an inclusive discipline.

KEYWORDS:

• Women
• gender
• conferences
• political science discipline
• parenting
• academy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Jennie Sweet-Cushman http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2652-5713

Monica C. Schneider http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6948-4520

Notes

1 See https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/lost-storm-how-hurricane-blew-through-political-science.

2 We contacted the APSA, Midwest Political Science Association (MPSA), Southern Political Science Association (SPSA), International Studies Association (ISA), Western Political Science Association (WPSA), and the International Society for Political Psychology (ISPP). We had a 30% response rate.

3 http://www.princeton.edu/dof/policies/family_friendly/family_friendly/.