Another announcement just went out in my field to apply for an award for research support. This one is for early-career people. There are parameters about who can apply.
I know one of the men on the committee, and it would never occur to him in a thousand years that the structure of this prize discriminates against mothers. He probably thinks he’ll give equal consideration to everyone, which might be true in a sense, but there are a lot of people who are not allowed to put themselves in the pool. For this specific research prize, they don’t actually list an age limit, but they care about how fast you have progressed through the PhD->job track.
Let’s just say that this blog post is about every “under 30” or “under 40” prize that you can think of. Any prize that is age-limited sends the message that you had better accomplish whatever you are going to accomplish professionally first. Having kids needs to be the afterthought, chronologically.
Biologically, for men and especially women, having a kid before you turn 30 makes sense, if you ever want to have one. Professionally, there are a lot of implicit barriers to doing this. One of the few remaining explicit barriers that I can think of is these age-stage-specific prizes.
In case someone out there is thinking that IVF solves this, I’d like to point out that it’s really miserable and of course does not always work. In case someone out there is thinking “Bryan Caplan already showed that parenting is easy, so why does this matter?” I have a whole rant about that from last year.
Economist Writing Every Day 
This was discovered and tweeted. So, hi. The way I wrote it sounds like asking for affirmative action for women, but that’s not what I mean to promote here. Lots of men in academia might feel like they missed their chance to start a family because of the pressure to achieve something early. If people thought they would have a chance again in their 30’s, they might spend their 20’s differently. It’s hard! I’m not really offering any solutions, but just trying to explore the problem.
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As an active father and academic, I think that you’re right.
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What are these awards trying to accomplish? To encourage unorthodox research from people at the start of their careers? Maybe limit to “first year postdoc” or “less than 3 years tenure”. But I think the truly underprivileged class would be those from people from less prestigious institutions, without the benefit of influential mentors.
Aside: in my field, the main annual conference started providing daycare options a year ago. I thought that was cool.
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https://www.aeaweb.org/about-aea/committees/cswep/programs/resources/midcareer_p2p “The Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (CSWEP)’s Mid-Career P2P program aims to help mid-career economists find community, support, and mentoring. ” Interesting to find a new program that is aimed to support women in the middle of their careers, instead of just the beginning.
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It was today (a month after the post) that I found out Forbes has a 50 over 50. https://www.forbes.com/profile/leanne-morgan/?list=50over50-lifestyle/&sh=4a63963230c2
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Somehow I believe this project is related: https://commonreader.substack.com/p/why-i-am-writing-about-late-bloomers
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