Really scraping the bottom… can’t we at least get parental leave during a postdoc?

By David Kent. Paid parental leave is absolutely essential if we want to retain the best and brightest minds in academia. Paid parental leave is the bare minimum of what should be provided for highly trained researchers with PhDs and it has instead become one of the hot button issues for early career researchers. One of the most stressful aspects of being a postdoctoral fellow is the lack of security and the financial instability. This can be absolutely crippling once you introduce babies into the mix. Postdocs tend to survive on short term contracts, fellowships or grants and are often frantically trying to figure out where next year’s paycheck will come from. A repeated refrain here at the Black Hole is that postdoctoral status in Canada is notoriously uncertain. More...