New initiatives offer child-care solutions to traveling scientists

In August, Elizabeth Pain of Science Careers covered critical role that childcare plays in boosting professional visibility for both female and male scientists.

Dealing with children while attending conferences is a problem that many scientists—women and men—must negotiate as they balance careers with parenthood. Some professional societies, funders, and institutions are trying to step up, working hard to find solutions to the conference-childcare problem. So far, the institutional solutions they’ve come up with aren’t perfect, and may never be, so parents are continuing to do what they’ve always done: Whatever they have to do to make things work out. “I think the world has changed a lot,” but there is still a long way to go, Deacon says.
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A more recent option is child-care grants that help parents pay for their own child-care solutions. “People just need flexibility, and they are the best ones to determine what will allow them to get the most out of a conference,” says Ylann Schemm, program director at The Elsevier Foundation.

Read more in Science Careers