Parental Leave on a Fixed-term Contract Update

My name is Anna; I'm a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellow at the Materials Innovation Factory in Liverpool, and have 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 our results were presented at the Vitae Conference in September 2017. We will then finally create the resource I was looking for, which will hopefully benefit other researchers taking these types of leave. A leaflet was created to support both researchers and institutions for parental leave, giving advice and best practice for different stages of leave, which was launched at the Vitae Conference in September 2019. More recently a report on researchers experiences of parental leave and what made it a good or bad experience has recently been created in August 2020. These resources are available on the UKRSA website in our projects section - click here for more information.

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.