Parental Leave on a Fixed-term Contract

My name is Anna; I'm a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellow at the Materials Innovation Factory in Liverpool, and have recently stepped down as co-chair of the UKRSA. For the last few years, I've been the lead on our maternity, paternity, adoption, and parental leave project.

Back in 2014, I was pregnant and confused about my rights as a fixed-term contract researcher. I had seen guidance from my institution and the UK Research Councils, but I really wanted to know more: what could I ask for? What should I expect from my University and my PI? Could I access some information from people who had been through it before?

I thought Vitae might be able to help, so I gave them a call and spoke to Katie Wheat, the UKRSA-Vitae liaison, for the first time. She was very helpful, but didn't have exactly what I was looking for - and, more than that; posed a question: would I like to develop such a resource? To cut a long story short: I would, and I joined my first UKRSA meeting to propose a project around researchers taking maternity, paternity, parental, or adoption leave.

We felt the first steps were to capture the experiences of researchers taking these types of leave: as many as possible. This turned out to be trickier than I expected, and involved a lengthy ethical approval process - entirely appropriate, for a subject that can be emotionally very sensitive - and I learned a lot about the concerns and issues around online surveys. We finally launched the survey in 2017, just after my daughter turned 2. With the help of our UKRSA networks, the Royal Society, the ECU, and many others, we had a fantastic response rate - nearly 400 women and men responded to our survey, and I'm so grateful to them all for sharing their experiences.

The next steps are to try to fully understand what the respondents are telling us, and to present the results at the Vitae Conference in September this year. We will then finally create the resource I was looking for, which will hopefully benefit other researchers taking these types of leave.

We're really excited and humbled to be able to hear from so many researchers to create this resource, and will be posting updates as we can. In the meantime, the NPA are doing some great work on this issue in the United States - do go and have a look there!

We'd be very happy to hear any feedback or comments; please contact me at anna.slater@liverpool.ac.uk, or via the UKRSA committee.