The study, led by Elena Päffgen of the University of Bonn together with Lisa Schielicke and Leonie Esters, was conducted in 2023 and distributed primarily through European academic networks and German institutions. Of the 245 participants, 58 percent were caregivers, and 56 percent identified as female. Most respondents were between 25 and 44 years old, the very stage of life when academic careers accelerate and families are formed. Participants answered 22 questions covering their conference habits, the barriers they face, and the support they would like to see, with separate question sets for parents and non-parents. The team combined quantitative analysis, including Pearson chi-squared tests of independence, with a qualitative content analysis of free-text answers, in which parents described in their own words what would make conferences workable for them.

The headline numbers are sobering. Nearly 80 percent of mothers and 57 percent of fathers reported that they had been unable to attend a conference because of family obligations, with the difference between mothers and fathers statistically significant. Around 77 percent of all participants agreed or strongly agreed that having children is a disadvantage for a scientific career, a view held by 87 percent of women and 81 percent of men without children. The researchers situate these findings within a well-documented timing conflict sometimes called the rush hour of life: in Europe, the average age of earning a doctorate ranges from 30 to 38 depending on the country, while women give birth to their first child at an average age of just under 30. The two schedules are almost perfectly misaligned.

The consequences ripple far beyond individual missed talks. Previous research cited by the authors shows that doctoral recipients with children are 3.5 times as likely to leave academia as those without, and that women with dependent children are significantly less likely to present at conferences. In Germany, female early-career researchers name the incompatibility of work and family life as the main reason for considering abandoning their doctorates. Because mothers still shoulder most caregiving, the burden falls disproportionately on them, feeding the so-called leaky pipeline through which women drain out of academic science at every career stage. The survey data reinforce what sociologists have called the motherhood penalty, though the authors are careful to note that fathers suffer too; one father in the survey simply wrote that he stopped going to conferences when he had his kid.

What would actually help? From the free-text responses, the team distilled five categories of support: family-friendly infrastructure, hybrid events, financial support, awareness of the challenges parents face, and clear communication from organizers. Childcare topped the list of concrete measures, rated helpful by 71 percent of caregivers. But the researchers stress that childcare is not a simple checkbox. At international conferences, children speak different languages, so multilingual staff matter. Drop-off and pick-up must be flexible to match both the conference schedule and the unpredictable rhythms of children. Rooms must be close to the lecture halls, welcoming, and open to parents at all times. Family activities and playrooms were rated helpful by 67 and 65 percent of parents respectively, and breastfeeding rooms by 28 percent.

Networking emerged as a hidden casualty. When asked about their main concern, 39 percent of caregivers named networking, which typically happens at evening receptions and conference dinners, often over alcohol, precisely the events that parents with children cannot attend. Many parents reported that they would rather leave the children at home entirely than bring them and miss the social fabric of the meeting. The authors suggest low-cost fixes: daytime networking events where children are explicitly welcome, parent forums where attendees can connect before the conference, and even a simple sticker on name badges identifying parents to each other. One respondent noted that if more colleagues used childcare offers, children could travel in groups and form a kind of replacement circle of friends.

Money is the other great barrier. Twenty-nine of the 66 free-text responses from parents included requests for financial assistance. When available, support is often too low and buried in complex application procedures. Parents described paying for extra childcare hours at home, larger hotel rooms, conference fees for children and accompanying caregivers, and travel costs for a partner who must take leave to help. The survey found that 92 percent of fathers and 87 percent of mothers rely on their partner for childcare while attending conferences, and parents who attend three or more meetings a year are far more likely to draw on a wider circle of relatives and friends. For single parents or those without strong support networks, the authors note, the barriers must be considerably higher still.

Perhaps the most surprising finding concerns scientists without children. Fully 84 percent of non-parents agreed or strongly agreed that family-friendly offers at conferences should be expanded, and about 80 percent said they would actively participate in efforts such as showcasing their research to children in dedicated sessions. Seventy-one percent said they do not feel disturbed by children at conferences, though some objected, with comments like children do not belong at work events, which the authors say argues for clearly designating where children are welcome and where they are not. This broad support matters practically, because funding for family measures may come from shared conference budgets, and it suggests, the authors write, a growing recognition across the academic community of the structural difficulties faced by caregivers.

The study distills its findings into a practical checklist for organizers, arranged before, during, and after an event, and graded roughly by cost. Low-effort measures include waiving fees for accompanying caregivers, publishing maps of stroller-accessible routes and changing tables, listing family-friendly hotels and nearby playgrounds, stating clearly when and where children are allowed, and confirming childcare availability before registration opens so parents can decide whether to attend in person. Higher-cost options, such as on-site childcare, travel subsidies, and hybrid formats, were rated most important by parents, and the authors urge organizers to seek sponsorship or reallocate resources to provide them. The paper also assesses the European Geoscience Union General Assembly, which with roughly 20,000 attendees offers free childcare, waived fees for children, nursing rooms, and a fully hybrid program, demonstrating what is possible at scale, though the authors acknowledge such resources are out of reach for smaller volunteer-run meetings.

The authors are candid about the limitations: the survey was not statistically representative, skewed toward European and German respondents, and the sample was too small for fine-grained statistical subdivision. Yet as a qualitative portrait, it fills a conspicuous gap, since data on the prevalence and effectiveness of family-friendly conference policies remain scarce. The authors hope their guidelines will spark dialogue between parents and organizers and extend to other disciplines, noting that their recommendations echo those developed in radiology, psychology, and beyond. They also caution that conferences are only one front in a larger struggle; as one respondent put it, the problem is everyday life. Still, if implemented well, the authors conclude, family-friendly conferences could meaningfully diversify the scientific community, keeping parents, and especially mothers, in the pipeline that science cannot afford to keep leaking.

Subject of Research: Barriers to conference participation for parents in the geosciences and measures for family-friendly academic conferences

Article Title: Towards family-friendly conferences: results from a first survey in the geosciences

Article References: Päffgen, E., Schielicke, L., & Esters, L. (2026). Towards family-friendly conferences: results from a first survey in the geosciences. Geoscience Communication, 9(3), 345-370. https://doi.org/10.5194/gc-9-345-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/gc-9-345-2026

Keywords: family-friendly conferences, geosciences, academic careers, parenthood, childcare, work-life balance, gender equity, leaky pipeline, early-career researchers, survey research, conference organization, diversity and inclusion

The research team, led by postdoctoral researcher Xinyi Zhao of the Center for Adaptive Rationality at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, together with colleagues, undertook what the authors describe as the first global longitudinal analysis of when gender differences emerge over the course of academic careers in psychology. Rather than examining a single country or institution, the team traced the publication histories of 78,216 psychologists worldwide who began their academic careers between 2000 and 2014. The data were drawn from the Scopus database, one of the largest bibliographic repositories in existence, which allowed the researchers to follow individual career trajectories across borders, institutions, and decades. Scientific publication activity served as the indicator of an active research career: a researcher who had not published any scientific work for at least five years was considered to have left active research.

The scale of the dataset matters, because attrition from academia is a slow, diffuse process that is easy to miss in cross-sectional snapshots. By tracking cohorts over time, the researchers could pinpoint exactly when the gender gap opens. Their answer: the largest differences appear between the fourth and sixth year after a researcher’s first scientific publication. This is a period during which the risk of leaving research rises substantially for everyone, as the initial excitement of a doctoral project gives way to the pressures of establishing an independent profile. But the rise is sharper for women than for men. The gender gap in attrition is most pronounced about five years after the start of a research career, precisely the window in which many researchers are finishing doctorates, moving between institutions on short-term contracts, and competing for their first permanent positions.

The cumulative effect of this early divergence is stark. By the thirteenth year of their careers, around half of the female researchers in the sample had stopped publishing altogether. Among men, that same halfway point of attrition was not reached until roughly five years later. In other words, even in a discipline where women form the majority of those entering, men sustain active research careers for meaningfully longer on average. This pattern helps explain a puzzle that has persisted for years: women are well represented among doctoral candidates and postdoctoral researchers in psychology, yet remain significantly underrepresented in professorships and other senior positions. The bottleneck, the study suggests, is not at the door of academia but inside it.

Lead author Xinyi Zhao framed the motivation for the work in terms of this paradox. In psychology, she noted, women are well represented among doctoral candidates and postdoctoral researchers, but far fewer reach the highest career levels. The team wanted to understand when women are more likely to leave academia and which factors are associated with this pattern. That framing is important, because much of the public debate about gender in science has concentrated on access—on pipelines, admissions, and the so-called leaky pipeline metaphor. The new findings redirect attention to retention, arguing that the bigger hurdle appears not to be entering academia but staying in it.

To probe possible causes, the researchers went beyond simple headcounts and modeled a range of factors that might plausibly influence whether a researcher stays active. These included publication output, citations, collaboration networks, and institutional characteristics such as the scientific reputation of a researcher’s institution. The strongest predictor of long-term retention turned out to be early publication output. In particular, a high number of first-authored papers—publications for which a researcher carries primary responsibility—was associated with a higher likelihood of remaining scientifically active over the long term. In later career stages, the number of last-authored papers, which conventionally signals scientific independence and leadership responsibility, became the more important indicator. Collaboration networks and institutional conditions were also associated with retention, but these relationships were considerably smaller than the effect of authorship patterns.

Crucially, however, none of these measured factors fully accounted for the gender difference. Even after publication output, citations, networks, and institutional prestige were taken into account, women remained more likely than men to leave research, and the difference was especially pronounced during the early years of academic careers. This residual gap is the study’s most consequential finding, because it rules out the simplest explanations. If women were leaving simply because they published less or worked at less prestigious institutions, controlling for those variables would have erased the difference. It did not. Something not captured in bibliographic data is shaping who stays and who goes.

Zhao was careful to caution against misreading the results. The findings, she emphasized, should not be interpreted as reflecting differences in scientific potential. Rather, they suggest that structural conditions and challenges during certain stages of life influence the career paths of female and male researchers differently. The publication-based analysis cannot, on its own, establish why women are more likely to leave. Information on starting a family, caregiving responsibilities, or individual career decisions was simply not available in the Scopus-derived data. The authors are explicit about this limitation, and it shapes how the findings should be understood: the study maps when attrition happens and what career-level factors correlate with it, but the underlying mechanisms require other kinds of evidence.

Some of that evidence comes from a companion study led by Zhao, published in Higher Education, which surveyed more than 8,000 researchers with children from 119 countries. Its results point toward one plausible mechanism: early parenthood is associated with greater career disruption for women than for men. Women in the survey were more likely to postpone starting a family until after completing their PhD. When parenthood did occur during the doctoral phase, their chances of completing a doctorate, achieving high scientific visibility, and remaining in research over the long term were lower than for men in comparable situations. Zhao described the two studies as complementary: the current work shows when women are more likely to leave research, while the survey findings suggest that the challenges of balancing an academic career with starting a family may be an important part of the explanation.

The research team concludes that science policy should place greater emphasis on the early career phase, the very window—roughly years four to six—where the gender gap in attrition is widest. Mentoring programs, transparent evaluation procedures, and better conditions for balancing research and family responsibilities could, the authors argue, help retain more women in academia over the long term. The findings also draw attention to a previously underexamined aspect of gender equality in academia: while discussions often focus on women’s access to academic careers, the decisive barriers may emerge later, once researchers are already inside the system. The team plans follow-up studies that will survey scientists around the world directly, asking about their career decisions and experiences, in order to move from mapping the attrition gap to understanding it from the perspective of those who leave. For a discipline that studies human behavior and prides itself on evidence-based practice, the message of its own career data is difficult to ignore: the pipeline is not leaking at the entrance, but midway through, and fixing it will require addressing the structural conditions of early academic life rather than only the question of who gets in.

Subject of Research: Gender differences in attrition from academic psychology careers

Article Title: Women leave psychological research more often than men

Article References: Women leave psychological research more often than men. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: psychology, gender gap, academic careers, attrition, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, publication output, early career researchers, parenthood, retention, bibliometrics, American Psychologist, science policy