Supporting Family Caregivers in STEMM A Call to Action (2024) / Chapter Skim
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5 Barriers to Effective Policy Implementation
5 Barriers to Effective Policy Implementation
Pages 81-94
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From page 81... ...
AFFORDABILITY While in many countries families receive subsidized or free childcare and other resources, in the United States, families carry the financial burden of care (Garfinkel et al., 2010)
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From page 82... ...
In a letter sent to the National Institutes of Health detailing challenges faced by postdocs with children, the letter writers analyzed data on average housing and childcare costs in cities across the country. Their results found that the cost of rent and care often exceeded 30 percent of income in a two-postdoc household, and in extreme cases, amounted to more than 75 percent of income, especially for those with more than one child (Guo et al., 2023)
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From page 83... ...
, and no representative survey of colleges and universities has assessed how many campuses provide childcare subsidies or on-site care. However, recent surveys of specific academic fields suggest the number may be higher in some areas of academia, but coverage is uneven (Dolamore et al., 2021; French et al., 2022)
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From page 84... ...
I'm finding it difficult to find eldercare benefits. So, it becomes really challenging." LACK OF AWARENESS Lack of awareness of existing caregiving institutional policies remains a key barrier to use and efficacy of family-friendly policies in academic PREPUBLICATION COPY -- Uncorrected Proofs
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From page 85... ...
Lack of awareness could have substantial consequences, as evidenced in interviews. Students and other early-career scholars reported great difficulty accessing even basic caregiving supports, such as postdelivery recovery time and parental leave or tenure clock adjustments because of awareness issues.
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From page 86... ...
Without clear documentation online and clear communication to department chairs and others who may serve as gatekeepers to policy access, students, faculty, and staff can remain uninformed about the support available to them. And, as is discussed later in this chapter, cultural beliefs and biases can lead to a fear of being stigmatized for utilizing caregiving resources, resulting in concerns among caregivers in reaching out to receive the information they need (Shauman et al., 2018)
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From page 87... ...
Policies may be written such that leave is granted only to those caring for the needs of an immediate family member. And even if policies apply to a broader definition of caregiving and are being shared by well-intentioned department chairs advising faculty members or faculty advisors assisting students, chairs and advisors may still implicitly assume that family leave is not as expansive.
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From page 88... ...
, we can't use that program anyway.... People think they're helping, but they're not really helping." While the policy attempted to provide paid caregiving support to help parents manage a child's sickness, implicit assumptions that did not account for those sick children also having disabilities or developmental challenges left the parents of these children without access to support.
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From page 89... ...
The forces affecting policy staying power operate at multiple levels and encompass factors ranging from issues of timing, leadership, managerial support, individual challenges, cultural conflict, organizational and procedural barriers, and outside influences from external events (Buchanan et al., 2005)
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From page 90... ...
CULTURAL BELIEFS AND BIASES Some barriers are grounded in deeply embedded systems in colleges and universities. As noted in Chapter 3, academic STEMM has a core cultural assumption that single-minded devotion to work is an indicator of scientific merit, and this cultural assumption is institutionalized into many standard policies and practices, including full-time, time-intensive tenure clocks and productivity metrics that do not consider periods spent focused on caregiving (Blair-Loy & Cech, 2022; Blair-Loy et al., 2023)
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From page 91... ...
Indeed, some used it as an opportunity to recalibrate the approach to the standards used to evaluate productivity and effect. As one example of broader efforts to promote cultural shifts during the pandemic, a team of researchers called on the field to reinvent promotion and tenure practices by, for example, advocating for the use of alternative impact metrics, such as "communication, community-based implementation, dissemination (e.g., Altmetric scores)
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From page 92... ...
In Chapter 6, we draw on knowledge of these barriers as well as existing evaluative research to outline foundational and promising practices to support family caregivers in academic STEMM.
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From page 93... ...
7. Policies that are not fully institutionalized but instead championed by one person or one group risk being discontinued if the policy champions leave the organization.
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From page 94... ...
PREPUBLICATION COPY -- Uncorrected Proofs
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