What Does It Mean for a Researcher to Be a Solo Parent?

Upon accepting her post at Nagoya University, Miho Tagawa relocated to Nagoya with her preschool daughter while expectant, leaving her husband behind to continue his work in a U.S. research institute. While raising her daughter solo, she gave birth to her second child. Miho returned to work before her newborn was even enrolled in a nursery. Despite the exhausting days and sleepless nights of juggling solo-parenting with work, Miho was determined to continue her academic career. This determination reflected her sense of duty, making her a role model for women academics, who she believes hold the key to Japan’s future.

If you don’t want to give up your career, you must live separately.

Upon accepting my post at Nagoya University in 2012, I had to move away from my husband with my young daughter. Previously, my husband and I worked at a U.S. research institute. My husband currently works at a research institute in Japan in a different prefecture from me. Because academic positions are limited in Japan, one has to consider off ers from all parts of the country. This means that couples have little chance of getting jobs at the same university. Usually, it is the wife who gives up her career and follows her husband, either pursuing a post-doctorate or working a part-time job. However, all the women in our community were unwilling to sacrifice their careers in this manner. Couples in academia today inevitably face the following dilemma: if both parties are unwilling to sacrifice their careers, they must live separately from each other. I was adamant that I would not abandon my career. This meant living separately from my husband.

A week to get used to being a mother and being irreplaceable

When I took up my post at Nagoya University, I had recently become pregnant with my second child. Initially, I did all the domestic chores alone with the baby inside me, and I sent my daughter to a nursery so that I could continue my research work. My husband was working at a U.S. research institute. Although he spent a few days with me after the baby was born, I had to parent alone after he left. It was unbelievably tough. Within a week after my second child was born, I was already back to work. What made it even more tough was something that is probably specifi c only to university staff: there is no one who can fi ll in for you at work. In particular, guiding the students in their undergraduate dissertations and master’s degree theses requires specialist expertise, and I was the only one who could perform these tasks. Legally speaking, I was on maternity leave and permitted to not return to work formally for at least two months. However, during this time, I guided students in their dissertations or other tasks while taking care of the baby. So I was doing all this work while simultaneously acting as the solo parent of a newborn and a two-and-a-half-year-old. It was absolute hell! (laughter)

Meeting others with the same experience and forming the community

When my second child was born, there was no one I could call for help. The sleepless nights and the pressures of my job had brought me to the brink of insanity. It was then that I met Azusa and Hiroko at Nagoya University. Like me, they were raising children on their own while living away from their husbands. The three of us would meet up for lunch. As we chatted, I realized that the three of us were going through the same thing. Our rapport comforted me and made the hardship more tolerable. We then resolved to help one another in times of crisis and that was how our community began—from a small three-person group. Soon after, we learned that there were other women academics who shared our circumstances. Upon investigating, we learned that around ten such women were on campus and that they were all struggling to cope. So, we invited all these women to lunch. That lunch meeting led naturally to our community being formed. As all our members are too busy anyway, we do not organize any particular activities; we simply have a mailing list. Our members can use this mailing list to invite others to a lunchtime chat or to ask questions about parenting. Often, someone sends a mail saying something like the following: “Because I don’t have time to prepare a meal, I want to eat in the university canteen with my child. Could someone accompany us?” Then, another member responds saying, “Sure! I’ll come!” Eati ng lunch in the canteen with two small children is a very big challenge! When you are feeding one of the children, the other might say, “I want to go to the toilet!” But when you go to the canteen with another parent who, like you, has two children, it is significantly easier to take care of the four children between the two of you.

More stressful than work: The social expectations of motherhood

The most diffi cult aspect of working while solo-parenting was not work pressure. The psychological pressures of motherhood that I felt during school PTA, nursery parents’ meetings, and the like were more diffi cult to handle. For example, Japan’s licensed nurseries disregard the needs of single-parent families; PTA meetings and event planning are held on weekday evenings. It is assumed that mothers who attend these meetings have the option to leave their children with their husband or parents/in-laws. Single parents, however, must leave their children at the nursery during the meetings and then collect them after the meeting ends late in the evening. As a result, the child might start going to bed later. This results in the child feeling tired in the morning, creating a vicious circle. It is a social norm that mothers should attend the PTA and nursery parents’ meetings. Single fathers, for unknown reasons, are let off entirely from PTA duties. One time, when my husband, who had come over for a weekend, participated in the cooking at a nursery parents’ meeting fair instead of me. The other mothers criticized me for this. I told them that I had been unable to attend the event due to work commitments, but they were indignant, saying, “Well, all of us have sacrificed our careers for our children.” As someone who was raising children alone while working just as hard as my male counterparts or even more, I couldn’t accept this attitude. With this mindset, society will always exclude women who want to pursue a career. Fortunately, there is an on-campus nursery. In my case, however, I couldn’t enroll my child because the timing wasn’t right. The great thing about this nursery is that all the parents are involved in the university and the nursery doesn’t organize activities that require parent participation.

Why I battled on as a solo parent

I continued to pursue my career owing to my passion for academics, but that was by no means the only factor. I also felt a sense of duty as a woman academic. I thought about the message I would send to the next generation of women if I quit now. It’s not that an academic job is better than other jobs in terms of pay or employment conditions. With the same academic qualifications, you could get a job in the corporate sector with better conditions. My university job entails plenty of overtime. This is particularly true during the entrance examination season. Because I fi finish work late every day, I would have to leave my child with my husband in Tokyo, and then after finishing a day of hard work, I would go to Tokyo to bring my child with me. I would receive an allowance for handling entrance exam-related work, but this didn’t even cover the transport costs; I had to make up for the shortfall myself! (laughter)

Financially speaking, it would have made more sense to find another job that would allow me to continue living with my husband; we would have been better off this way. Despite everything, I was determined to stick by my career. I was driven in large part by a sense of duty; unless more women pursue their academic careers, the country would have no future. It was surely the same for the other members. All of us had a strong conviction that we should commit to our academic careers and pave the way for future women academics. While working for an institute in New York State, I noticed that 40% of the people there were women, and yes, many of them were raising children. The climate was completely different. The truth is that the issue extends beyond Nagoya University or beyond universities in general; we have to reform the country as a whole.

The significance of forming a self-help group

I believe that we—the women academics—should take the initiative to support ourselves to the extent possible. Public funding for universities declines annually, so we cannot overly rely on subsidized programs. One of our key activities is to help women academics who have newly started work at the university find suitable accommodation. For example, a member might notify the person of a vacant apartment in her apartment house. This is becoming one of the important types of support provided by this community. As a result, we now have an apartment house let out only to women academics working at Nagoya University. If this were to be a university-led activity, meaning that if the university were to provide accommodation for solo mothers, it would first have to secure a budget. By the time the accommodation is finally provided, the children would have already grown up. That’s why we prefer to take action ourselves. Using word-of-mouth networking, we aim to secure places where we can live communally; we find a place and say, “Let’s monopolize this place for our members!”

Women’s academic careers in a male-dominated society

The academic world has unspoken rules governing the age at which you ascend each rung of the career ladder. Fail to stick to these rules, and you can never get back on the ladder. I would argue that women academics are somewhat disadvantaged by this system. It would help if more male academics in senior positions had parenting experience. If chief researchers or faculty directors have childrearing experience, for instance, they will understand the challenges of parenting and think more about ways to assist the careers of time-deprived academics. We have our own ideas about how we could get a lot more work done, but we can hardly talk about this issue with them.

The academic benefits of parenting

The academic world has unspoken rules governing the age at which you ascend each rung of the career. Sometimes, the journey home from the nursery takes a while. For example, one day, I was heading back on my bicycle with my daughter riding with me. As we passed by the shrubberies around the School of Agricultural Sciences, I pointed out how pretty the moon looks to my child. After we left the grounds, she asked me whether the moon in the sky was the same as the one she had seen before. “It’s the same one,” I told her. “No, it looks different,” she replied. So we stopped and went back to the shrubberies to compare the two moons. Carrying on thus, it felt like we would never make it back home! (laughter) Children are inquisitive creatures. They feel curious about several things, so adults get bombarded with all sorts of questions. Children are natural scientists, aren’t they? It’s great fun to spend time with your child thinking about why certain things are the way they are, and as an academic, there is so much you can learn from your child. Moreover, children with a parent in academia will encounter science from an early age. The parent and child can both learn from each other.

MIHO TAGAWA

Miho Tagawa is Associate Professor, Center for Integrated Research of Future Electronics (additional post at the Graduate School of Engineering). After working as a researcher in the United States, Miho began working at Nagoya University in 2012. She is a mother to two daughters. Her husband and her parents live far away, so she is a solo parent on weekdays.

This article is a part of ScienceTalks Magazine issue The Friendly Solutions Proposed by the Researchers’ Community for Child Care Support at Nagoya University.