Dr Beth Fulton is ecosystem modeller and principal research fellow with the CSIRO.  At work, she travels regularly, supervises three graduate students and oversees a team of 15 scientists; in 2007, she was Prime Minister’s Life Scientist of the Year.  At home, she’s a mum of three, devoted party-goer, and occasional sweeper of floors.

Science Hub is delighted to talk to Dr Fulton about finding a work-life balance and thank her for the generosity with which she’s shared her experience.

“At some point, you’re going end up being accused of being away too much, even if you’re not away as much as you could be.

“With my family, being quite open has worked.  You need to be as open about how many things you say ‘no’ to, as how many things you say ‘yes’ to, so they understand that you are making sacrifices for them.

“Then you have a set of almost unimpeachable rules – that regardless of what the opportunity is, you still say ‘no’ [in order to prioritise the family].

“In our household, the rule is that I’m always home for birthdays.  And it’s unbreakable.  Regardless of what meeting they want me to go to, or whom I’m to talk to, that rule never gets broken and it’s something my family can depend on then.

“The other side of it is to get them interested in what I’m doing, and to help them see the value of it, so that it doesn’t become a competition.

“Then they can get as excited and as interested about things as you are.  You’ll find for different parts of your family that there will be different ways of doing that.

“My daughter and I email quite regularly, even when I’m in town.  She and I will have an email conversation quite separate to the ones we have verbally, whereas my son actually gets interested in where I’m going.

“He wants me to find things for him, and find things out while I’m away.  And with my youngest child, before I go, we actually draw out on the globe where I’m going and how long that’s going to be.  And so you engage in different ways for each member of the family.

“It’s that combination of communicating, being flexible, being clear, but also having things that they can depend on.

“When I’m at home, I try to read them a story.  We have a conversation about what they’ve done.  You make it the quality of time that you’re spending together, rather than necessarily the length.

“I’ve been quite lucky in that my partner’s a stay-at-home Dad.  I don’t think I could have done as much without him there to help me out, so that’s a tricky thing.

“And  it’s not easy, you let some things slide.  So, don’t worry about sweeping the hall every week.”

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• Skills – Communication: Advocacy, objectivity and talking to your grandmother
• Skills – Negotiating the Workplace: Dr Beth Fulton on being a female scientist of international renown
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Professor Barry Marshall, co-discover of the Helicobacter pylori bacterium responsible for stomach ulcers, sees scientifically trained mothers as an unappreciated part of the scientific workforce.

“There’s an untapped reservoir of woman with PhDs who have started their families and are trying to get back into the workface part-time,” he says.

Since winning the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 2005, his entrepreneurial talents in biotechnology have flourished, and he is now developing a H. pylori platform technology under the auspices of Ondek, his new company.

“If we have 10 scientists at the bench, we would probably employ another 10 who would be in sales and marketing, drug registrations, and all the business aspects relating to the technology.  Good PhDs don’t have to spend the rest of their life at the bench,” says Professor Marshall.

“These people are very, very valuable to me for developing business plans, doing applications and intelligence work on patents, to collaborate on contracts and so on.

“… I think this is the kind of opportunity [scientific mums] would love.  That’s where I would expect to find very, very good untapped resources.”

In science, and most industries, it is usually mothers who leave the workforce to become primary care-givers when they begin their families.

It can be difficult for women who have invested so much in educating themselves to leave satisfying, successful careers, and for scientific mums especially, the decision can be hard.

In the forefront of their minds is the realisation that while they are raising their children, male colleagues and women without children are advancing professionally and leaving them behind. Ongoing concerns about their prospects for re-entering the workforce and juggling their new, combined responsibilities of family, children and a professional job also factor.

In part, these concerns are based on the little acknowledged inflexibility of the scientific workplace.

Finding part-time, casual, contract or time-share work in professional science is difficult.  Employees with these types of arrangements often either negotiate these conditions individually with sympathetic employers, or are engaged in a terminating project for which funds have become limited.

A win-win situation for parents and for the scientific industry itself would be to create employment with more flexibility.  Part-time or contract work would allow parents to balance family and work, keep up-to-date with advances in their field, and maintain an income stream.  It would mean experienced, highly skilled employees would remain in the workplace to maximise Australia’s investment in the scientists it has trained.

For Dr Mums considering a return to work, telecommuting could even be an option, with excellent communication skills being the first requirement.

“Being literate and being able to write independently is very, very important,” says Professor Marshall of the off-bench roles he envisages for scientifically trained mothers, and other science graduates considering work in the biotechnology industry.

“If you are a good communicator with excellent writing skills, and a bit of common sense, then there are already opportunities out there.”

Are you a scientific mum, or dad, and away from science until your children grow up?  Would you like to return to scientific work part-time?  Are you a potential employer who would consider hiring a scientific mum or dad to work part-time?  Click here to take our survey.