Having a child can affect the career outcomes of both parents in academia, but women face more-severe career penalties, according to a new study that tracked the careers of over 13,000 male and female academics working at Danish universities between 1996 and 2017. The findings indicate that even countries with family-friendly social policies may see this kind of disparity.
Based on data, the researchers found that, 8 years after having a child, women with children were 29% less likely to still be working in academia than those without children. That’s nearly two times as likely as fathers, who were only 14% less likely to still be employed as an academic.
Importantly, the data suggest that these women didn’t leave academia because of differences in their career ambitions compared with those of men. They also weren’t leaving academia to stay home with their children or to seek out more lucrative opportunities.
Rather, one of the key drivers behind this exodus appeared to be a result of how childcare responsibilities are typically split between men and women.
According to a 2017 survey of over 6,000 PhD students and academic researchers, which was also conducted by the researchers, women with children were far more likely than their male counterparts to be the ones taking on the childcare tasks that are more time-intensive and unpredictable, such as caring for children when they’re sick or taking them to doctors’ appointments. Assuming the lion’s share of childcare responsibilities greatly limits the number of hours women can work, which could be especially damaging in a work environment that closely links research output to career progression.
“If you’re competing against a cohort of men who are not taking their share of childcare, that really puts you in a disadvantaged position,” says Sofie Cairo, an assistant professor at Copenhagen Business School and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zurich and one of the authors of the study.
Uneven childcare responsibilities would also explain why women are less likely to hold tenured positions. The data showed that mothers who chose to stay in academia were 23% less likely to be tenured 8 years out from having a kid. Fathers, on the other hand, saw no significant drop in their tenure prospects after becoming parents.
Despite the study focusing on academics at Danish universities, the findings are likely applicable globally, says Chaoqun Ni, an associate professor at the Information School at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who has also looked at gender disparities in academia but wasn’t involved in the current study. “Denmark is a best-case scenario with its generous job-protected leave and universal childcare coverage,” Ni says. “The fact that these researchers still found massive motherhood penalties in retention and tenure tells us that formal family policies alone aren’t enough.”
Ideally, both parents would be evenly splitting childcare responsibilities. In fact, survey respondents agreed that shared childcare is important, “but getting from that sort of mindset into actually implementing that in practice seems to be a lot harder,” Cairo explains.
In the meantime, both Cairo and Ni say that universities need to find a way to accommodate parents, particularly in the early years of parenthood. “I think the most effective solutions must tackle the caregiving shock directly and decouple academic success from the expectation of constant, uninterrupted availability,” Ni suggests.
2026 American Chemical Society
