Paola — Doctoral Student & Mother in Tech

Paola Elefante is a doctoral student at University of Helsinki (Inverse Problems Group). Her current research is on Dynamic X-ray Tomography. She has presented her work at various conferences and has won various scholarships for her work. She is a proud mother of a two and half year old daughter, who she sometimes takes with her to conferences!

Q: You have experience as an academic. Can you talk a little bit about your experience as a mother in the academia?

Yeah, well, I immediately became ten years older, when I became a mother. I accept it, it is nice and she motivates me at what I am doing. I became so sensitive. When you have this little thing looking up to you, it hit me like that. It changed my perspective towards life and personal approach for things. I would say that she is my inspiration! Also, I am pretty lucky as I am in Finland. It is a very family friendly country. Both my husband and I are immigrants here from Italy. We have flexible work schedules, which is a great help. Our work cultures are very accepting of families. In fact work culture promotes having family. There is, although, room for improvement in academia. For academics, mobility is quite important. This is a problem across genders. As you know, mobility doesn’t marry well with family, especially if you have kids. For academics, international exchange is pretty critical for your career and growth. In the applied mathematics field, at least a couple of years abroad is required to boost your career.

Q: You said you are lucky to be in Finland and you are from Italy, can you speak a little about Italy and its environment?

In Italy, only half of the women are working. There are very little services to support women with career — daycares are either full or very expensive. Family culture is not embedded in the company culture. In Finland, if your child is sick, you can take a day off. They take it as your fundamental right. In Italy, it is quite the opposite, family is considered, threatening by your employer. Fathers choose not or are not allowed to take paternity leave. Even for a young woman, it is a great penalty in the hiring process. Women don’t feel very supported at work. It is very inconvenient. Whoever works there, they do it for pride and not as much money. I have been in Italy for about 25 years. I moved here, when I got the first grant from the University about five years ago. I feel so lucky to have taken that opportunity and I consider myself permanently living in Finland. Also, Finland has Sweden as a neighbour, which has pretty impressive numbers of working women, so things will only get better for family and working women here. If I was in Italy, I may not be a mother now. It could be difficult balancing work and family responsibility. It may have been demeaning in some sense too.

Q: What is the current project that you are working on?

I am applied mathematician. I use mathematical tools in real life application. We have a very heterogeneous group — where I work with real and simulated data. I am trying to research an algorithm to reduce the X-Ray exposure for the object, in my case the object is moving. Some applications of my work could translate in improving angiography.

Q: How do you balance your time between research and family responsibility? What happens when you have to take unplanned leave?

Well, I have a great help and that is my husband. We have shared responsibility. He also has the luxury of flexibility of schedule. One of the secrets of getting things done when you have kids is keeping things very regular. Office work time is very regular and I am very efficient during the work hours. Of course, if there are requirements, if I need to work more, we arrange with my husband or for a babysitter, or fly out our parents from Italy. If you live flexibly and there is support from workplace, the employer has to place a lot of trust in the employees, that is not easy. Honestly, if someone would have told me about Finland in Italy, I would not have believed. Much credit goes to Finland and all this culture around family.

Q: When you discovered that you were expecting, what was your role? How did you continue the research and the academic responsibility?

I was a PhD student, maybe nine months after I started. I continued working for eight months. I went into maternity leave for about ten months (give or take). Here in Finland, often you write a thesis as junior researcher. It is mostly an individual work. I was not yet involved in group work or teaching. Perhaps if I go now, it may be difficult, but not as much as I don’t leave anything hanging there. I have a senior colleague who is on paternity leave for a few months. Sweden, has pretty good percentage of fathers staying at home. Some reports show dads who stayed at home for a while it was very enlightening for them. They develop such a bond with kids. Every father should do it. It is not as if motherhood comes with a handbook.

Q: What are team structures like on a research project? Do you have quarterly goals? How do you measure the progress of the project?

Yeah, no we don’t have quarterly goals. Also, this maybe as it is mathematics. In physics there are many people on a paper. So in a way, responsibilities are much more individual in our field. Recently, we started having goals from one meeting to the other. We discuss at the meetings that follows if you were able to achieve it and if not what are the blockers. My supervisor believes in a lot of freedom. I don’t have a lot of pressure, except what I put on myself.

Q: Do you see yourself joining the workforce in the tech industry? Why/Why not?

I may, because of the problem of mobility. I like academia. Higher education teaching is something I would miss, for sure. But I see that going to industry is an option. It has been five years learning Finnish. It has so different rules from most Indo-European languages. You won’t believe, I learnt plurals in the 3rd course. So, to move out of the country, seems like it would be a lot of wasted effort in learning a new language. In addition, it would be crazy for my husband to leave his good job and I don’t want my family to make such sacrifices to integrate in a new country. There are many biomedical companies in Finland for which there is some sort of natural bridge with the research I am currently doing.

Q: What is your typical day like? Do you work from home?

I organize my schedule more week by week as compared to day by day. Since food is my responsibility, I prepare a weekly menu. So I have go grocery shopping only once a week. Fixed parameters in house work a lot. My husband knows what to do, I don’t have to tell him anything. Usually my husband is the one who take the kid to daycare. So I get to start my day as early as 7:30 in the morning. I come back from work around 3:30 in the afternoon, while picking her back from daycare. Then we play for a while, talk about what new she learned while I prepare dinner. After she has dinner, we play and then she goes to sleep. Then I have most of the evening to myself. I usually do not work in the evening, but try to plan some time with my husband, watch a movie or play a game. My husband is also undertaking his MBA studies remotely. So, these days he uses the evenings for studies. So, I usually take up some extra tasks from work or read a book. At work I have total flexibility. Some people do work from home, I personally don’t do that as I am not much productive at home. Since workplace attitude is result oriented, as long as you fulfill your duties nobody questions the number of hours spent in office. I personally think, putting responsibilities on people motivates them.

Q: Are there times when you are solving a difficult problem and it goes home with you? Do you get time to ponder on the challenge at home?

Yes, certainly there are times. Even when I was so close to finishing the code, I force myself to pick up my daughter. I force myself to switch, since there is no urgency except my own curiosity. When I have some time, after she goes to bed, I can checkout the code. I respect these two parts of my life and try to sincerely balance them.

Q: What are the major challenges that you face a mother in the field of research? If you could change any one thing/process, what would it be?

Many little things. Unavailability of childcare at conferences. Work related mobility and balancing family responsibility is a problem. One year is a lot and if you don’t go to events for a year, that is a lot of missed opportunities. I collected a list of conferences for childcare in academia. Many countries like Germany, US, UK, Australia are doing good in this respect.

Q: You travel a lot to present your work, network at conferences — what are the things that you find are working well for you (not a lot of mothers are able to do that) and what are the things that could be improved?

Child care services are still required. I am lucky as I have a very supportive husband. I manage to go to conferences because of him, but for him it is a sacrifice. He comes with me to the conferences with my daughter. It is more about acknowledging. Think of a very normal academic career, the post-doc years are most delicate, you have to continuously network. For men, it is sometimes easy as they can wait to have kids. We make the kids before men, fertility works differently, haha…

Q: What is your advice to women in academia who are trying to balance family responsibility and research work?

• Be strong.
• Know your rights.
• Communicate well — be sure that the work place knows about your challenges.
• Network. If your difficulties are also others, then you can fix the system together.

For instance, we had an unfortunate event last year. Someone reported a sexual harassment case. This led to some more cases being exposed and led to some informal discussion. This was not an isolated case, many people witnessed this and were victims of these cases. These networking events exposed these problems and it also led practical solution. A petition was sent to the Dean to start an education program for women and others. There was a very good participation in these programs and it was decided they will be regular. It shows the power of network, communication and being aware of your legal rights!

Originally published at www.pimothers.com.