The Transition to Motherhood in Academia

The Transition to Motherhood in Academia: Babies, Burnout, and the Blind Spots of Academia

The Academy’s Favourite Myth: Scholars Are Disembodied

From Dossier to Delivery: A Collision of Life and Career

Becoming a mother is often described as a profound life transition, but for women in academia, it can feel like stepping into a system that wasn’t designed for bodies, emotions, or caregiving. The expectations of productivity, visibility, and relentless progress in research and teaching rarely align with the biological, emotional, and social realities of early motherhood.

I had just submitted my dossier for tenure and promotion two weeks before finding out I was pregnant. I told myself I could move forward with hope, after all, I had worked hard, produced as much as I could despite significant institutional barriers, served as a mentor to many students at all stages, and carried more administrative duties than many colleagues at my stage. When the letter arrived from my school letting me know they would not support my application, the words felt like a blow to both my career and my sense of self.

I remember it was a Monday. I had been taking such careful care of myself, eating well, prioritizing rest, and trying to keep my body strong for pregnancy. Yet mere hours before giving birth, while on my back in labour and awaiting final cervical effacement, I found myself texting a trusted mentor for guidance. With each contraction, my unborn baby’s heart rate slowed, of grave concern to my husband and I, but as well to the physician and nurses tending to my labour, while I simultaneous tried to focus on how or when to craft a rebuttal. Ten days. That was all the time I had to respond.  In that moment it felt as though years of effort, of late nights and relentless dedication, had vanished.  I now know institutional politics were involved, though they did not fully explain the decision, but at the time it was just raw, personal devastation, juggling the impossible demands of labouring for life and for career at the same time. 

Pregnancy, Stress, and Preterm Birth

Pregnancy is already a liminal space, an in-between where the body is doing immense unseen labour. Science shows that stress during pregnancy is associated with adverse outcomes, including preterm birth and maternal mental health challenges (Dole et al., 2003; Hobel et al., 2008); more about this in a future post. My son would arrive a month early. I have often wondered about the connections.

Maternity Leave and Invisible Labour

As I prepared for maternity leave, I tried to do what most academic women do: tie up loose ends, support graduate students, close dossiers. But in truth, there is no clean line between “before leave” and “after leave.” Graduate students still need supervision. Publications cannot sit indefinitely. When you are responsible for the careers of others, you do not want your leave to stall their momentum, even as your own body is healing and your newborn is entirely dependent on you.

This tension is common. Research has documented how academic mothers often continue to supervise and mentor during leave, even when officially “off,” because the stakes for their students are too high to pause (Misra et al., 2012). Yet such invisible labour is rarely recognized or counted in tenure and promotion metrics. Instead, what shows up are the gaps: fewer publications, slower progress on grants, reduced visibility at conferences. The myth of the disembodied scholar persists, erasing the embodied realities of mothers and caregivers alike. My experience is just one story, but it reflects a broader truth: academia’s systems often fail those who carry both babies and burdens, and the cost is more than just productivity, it’s our health, our momentum, and sometimes, our sense of self.

Science tells us that the postpartum period is a vulnerable time for maternal mental health. Rates of postpartum depression and anxiety in Canada are estimated at 23% (Statistics Canada, 2019), and risk factors include both biological changes and social pressures. In academia, the “social pressure” is structural: the tenure clock does not pause for sleepless nights, nor for the physical recovery from childbirth, nor for the emotional disorientation of early motherhood.

Momentum Lost and Gendered Reality of Academia

Momentum is a word that haunts many of us. For me, momentum slipped through my fingers during those months. Papers sat unfinished. Research projects slowed. Each day was split between care work at home and intellectual labour I could not fully abandon, shadowed by the unresolved consequences of the letter I had received just days before giving birth…a process my union had only managed to stall temporarily during maternity leave.  The sense of “falling behind” was constant, and the comparison to colleagues, often men, often unencumbered by caregiving, cut deep.

I still remember a conversation with a male colleague who had taken paternity leave. He told me, almost proudly, that the month had been incredibly productive, a stretch of time when he had managed to focus entirely on getting papers out. His story fell on deaf ears. Maternity leave is nothing like that. Women are healing physically from the birthing process, while their bodies are also navigating profound hormonal shifts. There is the exhaustion of round-the-clock infant care, the often-fragile process of learning to breastfeed, and the daily struggle not to lose oneself entirely in the overwhelming demands of being a mother to a newborn. To compare these experiences under the same label of “leave” is to erase the stark difference between them.

And yet, I held on through my students. Supervising, mentoring, guiding them forward anchored me during this time. It was one way of continuing to contribute, even when my own research felt interrupted. This mirrors a larger pattern: women academics frequently channel energy into teaching and mentoring during caregiving years, contributions that profoundly shape the academy but remain undervalued in formal evaluations (O’Meara et al., 2018).

Structural Inequities and Intersectional Perspectives

Looking back, I see how profoundly unprepared academia is for the realities of reproduction and caregiving. We cannot continue to operate under the illusion that scholars are disembodied minds, unaffected by life transitions. We celebrate intellectual output while ignoring the structural inequities that shape who can sustain that output at what cost. And I write this from a position of privilege, as a white, middle-class woman, aware that for many scholars, especially those who are racialized, first-generation, precariously employed, or living with disability, these inequities are even more profound and unforgiving.

Toward Cultural Change in Academia

We need more than policy tweaks. We need cultural change…an academy that recognizes the full humanity of its scholars, values caregiving as part of scholarly life, and does not penalize women for the very labour that ensures the next generation, both biological and academic.

My own transition to motherhood was painful, disorienting, and career-altering. It exposed cracks in a system that still demands linear productivity from bodies and lives that are anything but linear. But it also revealed a truth I carry with me still: that care, whether for children or students, is not separate from academic life. It is at the heart of it.

-- Anne TM Konkle, PhD 

References

Dole N, Savitz DA, Hertz-Picciotto I, Siega-Riz AM, McMahon MJ, Buekens P. Maternal stress and preterm birth. American Journal of Epidemiology. 2003 Jan 1;157(1):14-24. doi: 10.1093/aje/kwf176. PMID: 12505886.

Hobel CJ, Goldstein A, Barrett ES. Psychosocial stress and pregnancy outcome. Clinical Obstetrics & Gynecology. 2008 Jun;51(2):333-48. doi: 10.1097/GRF.0b013e31816f2709. PMID: 18463464.

Misra J, Lundquist JH, Holmes E, Agiomavritis S. The ivory ceiling of service work. Academe. 2012; 98(1): 22.

O'Meara K, Jaeger A, Misra J, Lennartz C, Kuvaeva A. Undoing disparities in faculty workloads: A randomized trial experiment. PLoS One. 2018 Dec 19;13(12): e0207316. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0207316.

Statistics Canada. Maternal Mental Health in Canada [Report], 2018/2019.   Retrieved from https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/190624/dq190624b-eng.htm.