Later Career: Staying, Adapting, and Asking for More 

Authored by members of the Communications Committee: Anaïs Remili, Clare Andvik, and Clarissa Teixeira.

This is the second article in a series exploring the experiences of parents and caregivers in marine mammal science. As noted in Part 1, these responses represent a small, self-selected group , a conversation starter, not a census. The voices here reflect women in mid- to later-career stages who have partners and who have, so far, remained in research. Equally important are the voices not yet captured:  those who left, those without structural support, and those for whom staying was not possible. We hope this series creates space for those stories to surface too.

The researchers in this part of the series represent those who have had children later in their career and/or have older children, and the balance between starting a family whilst establishing research groups, mentoring students, publishing, and securing positions, sometimes against significant institutional resistance. 

The missed opportunities

By mid-career, the individual moments of sacrifice that defined the early years may start to accumulate: a missed conference, a declined field season, a workshop abroad that was simply not feasible. Each missed opportunity is a collaboration not formed, a job not heard about, a moment of visibility quietly lost.  Individually, none of these decisions are career-ending. Collectively, they shape trajectories.

Filipa Samarra, a research centre director in Iceland who finished her PhD in 2011 and has two children aged six and nine, describes the conference problem with particular precision: “I only attend a few conferences, sometimes none per year, which impacts my ability to network and share the research we do.” For a researcher based on a small, remote island, conferences are not an optional extra, they are the primary mechanism for staying connected to a broader scientific community, for building the relationships that generate collaborations and invitations, and for remaining visible to colleagues who make hiring and grant decisions. 

Rocio Loizaga, who raised two children while building a research career at Argentina’s National Research Council, with no nearby family, frames the missed opportunities with characteristic directness: “There were times when I couldn’t travel to conferences or participate in long fieldwork expeditions. I also had to miss out on certain workshops and courses. It wasn’t easy, but I had to find other ways to keep my research moving forward.” 

Parenthood as a research lens

Many of these researchers describe parenthood as fundamentally reshaping how they think about their science. Not only how they manage their time, but the questions they ask, why those questions feel urgent, and the kind of future they are working toward.

Vanessa Pirotta, a whale ecologist working across academia, government, and private sectors in Australia, describes it as a shift in how she asks questions: “being a mum has opened my eyes up to a whole new world as to how I ask research questions and how I am present for the next generation of scientists.” Clare Andvik, a PhD candidate studying killer whales in Norway, frames the same dynamic from a conservation angle: “I feel even more of a motivation to do what I do now, as I want to protect the oceans and the planet for my children to enjoy. I feel like I have even more at stake because I look at their innocent faces and imagine the world I want for them.” She is careful to acknowledge the shadow side of this: “The bad things feel even more bad and hopeless now, because it’s my children and grandchildren who will suffer.” 

Rocio takes this a step further, connecting her own experience of navigating institutional barriers to her philosophy as a mentor and research leader. Having been told, implicitly and explicitly, that her pregnancy was a professional problem, she has built a research environment deliberately designed around the opposite message. “My goal is to mentor the next generation of marine scientists to be not only world-class researchers but also resilient, well-rounded individuals who know that it is possible to pursue their passion for science without sacrificing their passion for their families.” 

The mobility trap

If one structural barrier stands out, it is mobility.  The conventional academic path, with multiple relocations across countries and institutions, was not designed with caregiving in mind. It assumes, in other words, geographic flexibility, limited personal constraints and often, invisible support systems. For many researchers, this model is no longer sustainable.

Filipa Samarra and her partner made a deliberate choice to relocate to a remote island in Iceland so that she could continue her long-term killer whale fieldwork without spending months away from home each year. “We are still working for a university, but we are based in a small town where the academic environment surrounding us is certainly not as bustling as we were used to.” 

The mobility problem also intersects with other pressures that these responses illuminate: the difficulty of building and maintaining a social support network when you move frequently, the impossibility of relying on nearby family when you live across an ocean from your relatives, the challenge of raising children in countries where you don’t speak the language. Filipa writes “It feels like the academic structure is working against parenthood sometimes,” and what she means by “academic structure” includes not just hiring practices and contract lengths, but the entire ecology of assumptions about how a serious researcher lives.

The Maternal Gap

Rocio names something that was widely experienced by all the respondents but is rarely acknowledged: the maternal gap. “When competing for positions or grants, it would

 be beneficial to weigh the achievements of women who were raising children during their careers differently. It is inherently more difficult to meet traditional scientific expectations, such as high publication rates, while managing the time and demands of motherhood.”

The maternal gap is not abstract. It is measurable: fewer publications, reduced conference attendance, collaborations become harder to maintain, fewer grants submissions. And not because of reduced ability or commitment. Rather, these gaps reflect competing, unavoidable demands: the researcher has just grown, birthed, and is now feeding a person, while their body recovers, sleep is interrupted, and cognitive resources are divided in entirely new ways. The metrics don’t account for this. They don’t see it. They simply record a gap.

Addressing it requires deliberate institutional adjustment: acknowledging career breaks in grant applications, normalising longer timelines to promotion, evaluating trajectories rather than snapshots, and crucially training the people who make hiring and funding decisions to recognise what a CV with a gap actually represents. Several major funding agencies have made progress on this, introducing provisions for career breaks and recognising parental leave in eligibility calculations. But the gap between policy existence and policy implementation remains wide, and in the absence of a cultural shift in how the gap is perceived, the formal provisions often go unused. 

Rocio writes “To be a true ally, we must move beyond ‘equal’ treatment and toward equity. We need to acknowledge the maternal gap in CVs and funding. We must value the immense efficiency and perspective that parents bring to the lab.”

Rocio highlights the “maternal gap” in science, where motherhood creates an unmeasured but very real disparity in academic output and career progression that current evaluation systems often fail to account for — Credit: R. Loizaga

What real support looks like and why it matters

Several respondents pointed to concrete examples of what genuine institutional and community support looks like in practice and the effect it has, both practically and symbolically.

The SMM conference in Perth received unprompted, warm praise from multiple respondents for its provision of family spaces, childcare facilities, and an explicitly welcoming atmosphere for parents with young children. Clare Andvik: “It felt so inclusive. I felt so welcomed as a mother, and my kids loved the toys and spaces available. And it was also so good for the participants to see children enjoying the space, it normalised them being a part of the community. I really encourage more of that for future conferences, it really makes a huge difference.” Filipa Samarra echoes a similar initiative: “Having dedicated rooms for nursing, or daycare, was very helpful.” The practical benefits are real parents who might otherwise not have been able to attend were able to participate. But the symbolic effect may be equally significant. A conference that visibly accommodates families is one that is telling its members, in a concrete and public way, that parents belong here.

At the SMM Conference in Perth (2024), Clare Andvik attended with her daughter, highlighting how family-friendly spaces and a welcoming atmosphere helped normalise children within the scientific community — Credit: C. Andvik

Hybrid and remote conference options receive equally strong advocacy, particularly from respondents who are geographically isolated or who can only attend one or two in-person events per year. “Of course, we know we miss out on the networking, catching up with friends and colleagues, and all the other advantages that in-person meetings bring,” Filipa acknowledges. “But if at least we can watch the talks, that goes a long way to helping feeling less left out of the latest in the field.”

The support that mattered most to our story-tellers at the individual level was, again and again, partner support. Filipa credits her partner with sharing childcare equally and frames the importance of this for her children in terms that extend well beyond logistics: “It is very important for me that my kids understand that a woman can be a mother and still have a fulfilling career, just like a man can be a father and have a career. That is not the example I saw at home growing up, and so it was particularly important to me that my kids could have a different one.” Rocio identifies her husband’s involvement as “the most definitive factor” in her ability to sustain a career: “Having full support at home both emotionally and logistically made everything manageable. It allowed me to balance the demands of the lab with the needs of my children, ensuring I never had to choose one over the other.” 

Filipa Samarra and her partner Paul share childcare equally, modeling for their children that both parents can pursue fulfilling careers — Credit: F. Samarra.

Pride, resilience, and the things that sustain you

Amid everything, the structural barriers, the missed opportunities, the mental load, the guilt that several respondents describe as a persistent and unwelcome companion, there are moments of quiet, fierce pride that recur throughout these accounts. 

Vanessa describes watching her children — “my calves,” she calls them, with an affection that is both personal and entirely characteristic — call out “humpback whale!” at a northward migration off Sydney. “A true proud moment,” she writes, “and the very reason I study such long-lived animals, so that my legacy lives on across generations.” Chloe Robinson describes photographing killer whales from a research vessel while operating a breast pump, four months after giving birth: “I really felt like I had this whole balance thing down.” Clare did fieldwork in the Arctic winter with a two-month-old daughter in tow, timing the days around feeds. Rocio felt “immensely proud” at every promotion, knowing what it represented,not just professional achievement, but proof that motherhood had not ended her career. Genyffer Troina, a postdoc fellow in British Columbia, states “it is hard, but hang in there, it seems like we are walking in the right direction to make improvements”. 

Vanessa Pirotta observing whales from shore with her two “calves” — Credit: V. Pirotta

What our marine mammal society can do

The message our interviewed researchers want to send is not subtle. They are not asking for sympathy or special treatment. They are asking for equity: structural, evaluated, and consistent.

Rocio calls for institutions and funding bodies to formally recognise the maternal gap in evaluation processes. Filipa asks for hybrid conference options and active childcare provision to become standard rather than exceptional. Vanessa asks colleagues and institutions to see parents as “fabulous candidates for opportunities,” not as provisionally committed researchers who need to prove themselves again. Clare, speaking from Norway, wishes the same basic structural support available to her were available everywhere: “I wish all countries and universities were as supportive as Norwegian ones. I feel so angry hearing how PhDs who become mothers are treated in other countries.” Genyffer calls for “research grants aimed for parents, and funding for child-care support for moms who have just graduated and want to look for a new position but can’t afford daycare”. 

Gaps in this conversation

This series has so far heard from seven women-identifying individuals, all with supportive partners, all of whom have remained in or near marine mammal research. What it has not heard is equally important and in some ways more so.

The experiences of non-binary parents, fathers and non-birthing partners are absent. There is evidence across the wider literature that fathers who take parental leave or who visibly prioritise caregiving face their own forms of professional penalty and social expectation; those experiences need to be part of this conversation too. The voices of single parents navigating research careers without the domestic and logistical support that every respondent here credits as essential are absent. So are those of researchers caring for parents, siblings, or partners with illness or disability, whose caregiving responsibilities may be less visible but no less demanding. Indigenous researchers face compounded challenges, balancing significant community and kinship responsibilities that remain largely invisible in academic productivity metrics, while working within systems not designed to recognize their knowledge systems. Researchers who had children and left the field, or who chose not to have children partly because of what they observed happening to colleagues who did, are not here. Neither are those from cultural and national contexts much of the Global South, much of Asia, many parts of Europe where the structural, financial, and social challenges of combining parenthood and research take entirely different forms from the Norwegian ideal that several respondents hold up as a model.

These are not peripheral stories. They are central to any honest accounting of what it means to be a caregiver in science. The present responses are offered as an opening, not a conclusion; a small proof that these conversations can happen, and a standing invitation to anyone who has not yet seen their experience reflected here to add their voice.
Please send your stories to communications@marinemammalscience.org

If you feel there are systemic barriers to access, inclusion and equity that should be addressed specifically within our society, please reach out to diversity@marinemammalscience.org.

Further reading

Below are a collection of peer-reviewed studies, and non peer-reviewed articles touching on the themes of this article. We hope it helps in adding weight to these shared experiences.

Gender gaps in academia: The role of children | ScienceDirect
The unequal impact of parenthood in academia | Science Advances
Ten simple rules for a mom-friendly Academia | PLOS Computational Biology
The relationship between parenting engagement and academic performance | PMC
Pregnant women’s brains shed grey matter to prime them for motherhood | BBC / Nature Communications
Single Mothers in Academia Share Best Practices | Spark Magazine
Father’s brain is sensitive to childcare experiences | PNAS

The Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) and the Global Indigenous Data Alliance.

Becoming a Parent While Becoming a Scientist 

Authored by members of the Communications Committee: Anaïs Remili, Clare Andvik, and Clarissa Teixeira.

This is the first in a series of articles exploring the experiences of parents and caregivers working in marine mammal science. The responses collected here are not a statistically representative sample of the field, nor do they claim to be. They are a starting point, a small but candid set of voices offered to open a conversation that is long overdue in this field. The experiences shared here reflect seven respondents, all women-identifying, and all with partners who share some caregiving responsibilities. But many voices are still missing. Single parents, fathers, non-binary caregivers, those caring for adult dependents, and those without partner support — and we recognize many additional groups not listed here — are not yet represented, and they matter. We hope this series invites them to share their stories too.

There is rarely a convenient time to have a child. In marine mammal science, a field built on long and at times unpredictable fieldwork windows, short-term contracts, international mobility, and the slow grind of competitive funding, the timing can feel especially stressful. The early career years are precisely when researchers are expected to be most available, most mobile, and most visibly productive. They are also, for some, the years when they are most likely to start a family. These two realities collide constantly. And yet, somehow, the collision remains underacknowledged in most professional spaces.

Yet people do it. They do it while finishing masters, PhDs and postdocs, between cruises and conferences, between one uncertain contract and the next. And for many, the moment of finding out they were expecting was not a professional crisis, it was, quietly and despite everything, joyful!

“Surprised, but immediately very happy,” wrote Amelie Laute, a bioacoustician specialising in humpback whales, who learned she was pregnant during her master’s degree. Chloe Robinson, a whale conservation researcher working for an NGO in Canada, described being “excited, but this excitement was also tinged with anxiety about managing a demanding job and being present as a mother.” 

For Clare Andvik, a PhD candidate studying killer whales in Norway, the happiness arrived alongside immediate, practical calculation: how will this affect the research project? She had just learned her PhD was funded when she found out she was pregnant. “I was scared that the pregnancy and having a child would affect the start up and progress of the project,” she wrote. “But then I began to plan it with my supervisor, and it worked out well.”

Not everyone’s supervisor responded that way.

The silence around pregnancy

For Rocio Loizaga, a researcher at the National Research Council of Argentina who had her first child during the final stages of her PhD, the moment of telling her advisor is one she still recalls with precise, painful clarity. Rather than congratulations, she received a question: So, what are you going to do now? “I went home in tears,” she wrote, “overwhelmed by the mental load of balancing a PhD with a newborn.” 

When Genyffer Troina, a postdoc fellow at the University of British Columbia, Canada, found out she was pregnant during her PhD, she felt “depressed, scared and afraid that I wouldn’t have the same opportunities as my ‘childless’ colleagues, especially because I am a woman”. 

When pregnancy is not celebrated, but rather repositioned as a professional problem, many researchers feel the instinct, or necessity, to hide it. Vanessa Pirotta, a whale ecologist working across academia, government, and private sectors in Australia, describes concealing not just one pregnancy but two, for years: “I felt as a scientist that I had to hide that I was pregnant. It would be looked down upon as if I was not available for opportunities and people would stop asking.” The cost of silence is high and paid privately, in the form of anxiety, isolation, and the exhausting performance of normalcy during a period of profound physical and emotional change.

Vanessa now speaks openly about her own experience specifically because she understands the downstream effects of that silence: “I want to be more open and transparent as a scientist with kids so that the next generation don’t feel as if they need to hide being pregnant or having children like I felt I had to do.” 

Fieldwork demands

Marine mammal science is, by nature, a field of physical presence. You have to be somewhere specific, at a particular time of year, often on a boat, sometimes in remote locations, sometimes for weeks. And for early-career researchers, fieldwork is not just data collection, it is professional visibility, skill development, mentorship, networking, and the foundation of a CV. Losing access to it, even temporarily, may have consequences that accumulate over time.

Almost every respondent identified fieldwork as the area where they felt the greatest professional loss. Many were not permitted to join due to pregnancy, or had to turn down life-changing fieldwork opportunities due to complicated childcare logistics or lack of support. 

But there were also inspiring accounts of creative workarounds. Clare Andvik did fieldwork in northern Norway with her two-month-old daughter, timing her days around feeds and pumping sessions on the boat, but credits the Norwegian parental leave policy as instrumental for this to work. Chloe was photographing killer whales from a research vessel while operating a hands-free breast pump at four months postpartum: “I always used to joke that I had my Dolly Partons on,” she wrote. Vanessa describes “countless science communication interviews I’ve given while breastfeeding, or hiding in a room, or publishing a paper during some of the toughest times.” These moments are recounted with pride, and rightly so. But they also highlight something deeper: a system that often requires researchers to adapt beyond reasonable limits to remain present. 

Chloe photographed killer whales from a research vessel while pumping at four months postpartum, balancing fieldwork and motherhood with determination — Credit. C. Robinson

Cognitive load 

Whilst the physical demands of pregnancy and recovery are underacknowledged, discussions regarding cognitive changes are almost entirely invisible.

Amelie Laute addresses this with particular honesty: “During the pregnancy and during early breastfeeding I felt like I am much less intelligent. This frustrated and worried me, not knowing if I will ever be able to work on as complicated matters again as before.” The neurological and hormonal changes of pregnancy and postpartum can temporarily affect focus, memory and processing, and not in ways that are predictable or easily timetabled. Not knowing whether you will regain your previous cognitive fluency, while simultaneously being under the kind of performance pressure that characterises early career academia, can be an isolating and frightening experience.

Genyffer vividly recalls the struggle of working through the night to finish her PhD, after caring for her 8 week old baby all day: “I would not get an extension to complete my PhD and would be expelled from the program if I had not finished”. She goes on to say that being both a mother and scientist means “I have to work really hard and extra hours to manage everything. I want to be a present mom, and I also want to excel at work, and that is very demanding…”. 

There is rarely formal recognition in most academic environments that the researcher who returns from maternity leave may need a gradual reintegration, more flexibility in deadlines or adjusted expectations for a period. The assumption is typically that the return from leave marks a return to normality, when in reality the body and brain are still very much in transition. And many, like Genyffer, are forced to return to work earlier than they would want due to inflexibility in contracts, funding arrangements and program rules, despite supportive supervisors (in Gennyfer’s case). 

What several respondents discovered, often to their genuine surprise, was that the cognitive reorganisation eventually produced unexpected gains. Clare Andvik noted increased efficiency: “The best way to get something done is to have a baby, put them down for a nap, and know you have 1.5 hours before they wake up, otherwise it won’t be done.” Chloe noted that needing to fit everything into defined windows “helped bust some procrastination.” Amelie and Clare both describe working in tight, focused sprints rather than the long, diffuse working days of pre-parenthood. 

Genyffer Troina pushed through long nights to finish her PhD while caring for her 8-week-old, balancing motherhood and science with relentless dedication — Credit: G. Troina

Partner support

Every respondent in this survey had a supportive partner. This is not a coincidence: it is, at least in part, a selection effect. Those without partner support may have left the field before reaching the stage at which they might respond to this survey. They may not have felt able to participate, or may not have seen their experience reflected in the framing of the questions. 

Even within this self-selected group of respondents with supportive partners, the degree and structure of that support varied considerably and those differences shaped outcomes. Amelie and her partner, both students at the time, split childcare strictly 50/50, each taking a half-day with the baby while the other worked. “Splitting up 50/50 between baby and work time was such a good way of life,” she wrote. 

Strong partner support was a key factor in enabling Amelie to remain and succeed in the field — Credit: R. Douglas

Clare points to her “supportive and hands-on husband” as one of the three pillars alongside the Norwegian welfare system and her own organisational strategies that made her PhD viable. Chloe credits her wife as “a huge supporter, especially in those early days, and continues to be a huge reason why I can do what I do.” Genyffer notes that family and financial context matter: “Having a partner outside academia provided financial stability and support that made this possible for me”.

What this underscores is clear: the sustainability of an academic early-career with children depends, in large part, on what happens at home on a set of private domestic arrangements, or the salary of their partner. The researcher who returns from parental leave to an equal-partner household and the researcher who returns to one where the majority of domestic responsibility has defaulted to her are not in equivalent positions, even if their institutional circumstances are identical.

The importance of speaking about it

A smaller but recurring theme across the early-career responses is the significance of visibility, of being able to see, in the professional landscape around you, people who have done what you are trying to do.

Clare, in Norway, draws comfort from the normalcy of what she is navigating: “I am one of many PhDs who have taken maternity leave. It is a nice feeling of community.” For Vanessa, that reassurance was largely absent in her early career, and now, from a more established position, she is actively trying to be what she didn’t have: “I want to show the next generation that having kids does not mean your scientific career is over. There are many of us doing the juggle and that’s OK.” 

This is, ultimately, one of the lowest-cost and highest-impact interventions available to anyone in a position of seniority or visibility in the field: simply being open about having children. Mentioning it in talks. Bringing it up in conversations with students. Not performing the fiction that scientific excellence requires the subordination of everything else. The researchers who did not have that kind of role model describe its absence as a genuine professional disadvantage. The researchers who are now deliberately providing it describe it as one of the most meaningful things they do.

What the Early Career parent needs

Taken together, these accounts point to a set of relatively clear if not always simple needs. Supervisors and line managers who respond to pregnancy with support rather than pressure. Institutional cultures that treat parental leave as a normal life event rather than an inconvenience or a signal of diminished commitment, with necessary provisions for contract extensions and a fair living wage. Fieldwork and conference structures that can accommodate the reality that researchers have caregiving responsibilities through flexible timing, shared responsibilities within teams, and clear policies around what pregnant or breastfeeding researchers can and cannot participate in. Evaluation systems that account for the cognitive and temporal demands of early parenthood. And senior researchers who are willing to be visible about their own experiences, so that the next generation does not have to navigate this terrain alone and in silence.

None of this requires a revolution. It requires the professional culture to catch up with the reality that the majority of researchers are already navigating. There are many parents and caregivers in the SMM community, and we hope that by sharing stories the lived reality can be normalized. 

We warmly invite anyone who feels comfortable to get in touch with us to share their own stories. Your experiences, whether as fathers, non-birthing partners, single parents, caregivers of family members, researchers who have left the field, or those navigating different cultural and national contexts, are essential to broadening this conversation. Hearing directly from a wider range of voices will help ensure that this series reflects the full diversity of caregiving experiences in science. Please send your stories to communications@marinemammalscience.org

If you feel there are systemic barriers to access, inclusion and equity that should be addressed specifically within our society, please reach out to diversity@marinemammalscience.org 

Further reading

Below are a collection of peer-reviewed studies, and non peer-reviewed articles touching on the themes of this article. We hope it helps in adding weight to these shared experiences.

Gender gaps in academia: The role of children | ScienceDirect
The unequal impact of parenthood in academia | Science Advances
Ten simple rules for a mom-friendly Academia | PLOS Computational Biology
The relationship between parenting engagement and academic performance | PMC
The Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) and the Global Indigenous Data Alliance.