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.