In Brit’s post of today, the topic of making professional appearances while pregnant came up, and was further discussed in comments. Brit reported that she chose not to appear at conferences and give talks during pregnancy; Sara Uckelman and I both narrated our positive experiences as pregnant women at professional events. L.A. Paul then offered reasons why this is a real concern for women:
It isn't that people would be negative about your pregnancy to your face. It's that when you show up pregnant you are suddenly re-categorized as a mommy. Sure, as a mommy who does philosophy, but in effect as someone who is somehow less serious about philosophy, or less committed, or somehow less likely to produce good work. That's the discrimination that women fear, and I think it is a real fear.
I do not for a second doubt that this is a real concern, and everything I will say in this post must not be taken as indication to the contrary. Nor do I in any way intend to criticize women who, like Brit, prefer not to make professional appearances during pregnancy if they can avoid it. But… I wonder if by avoiding this kind of exposure, we are also not missing a chance to counter the stereotype described by L.A. Paul in the comment above. I remember once attending a talk by Alice Crary at the CUNY Graduate Center many years ago; she must have been at least seven months pregnant then. I remember clearly how absolutely marvelous it was to see her deliver a great talk with a huge belly (so much so that it was the first time I felt like being pregnant again – my older daughter was then just past her first year).
In other words, while it may be a perfectly reasonable strategy from the point of view of one’s individual career and interests, I do think that women can make small but real contributions towards countering the prevalence of these stereotypes by making kick-ass appearances at professional events while pregnant. And at the risk of going totally overboard in the ‘shameless self-promotion department’, I can’t resist writing about an episode that happened to me, which is in fact one of the events in my professional life that I am most proud of.
I had received my first invitation to be a keynote speaker while expecting my second child, but the conference would be in Germany and my daughter would be 3 months-old by then. I said yes, figuring that things would sort themselves out somehow. When the time came, it turned out my husband would be traveling for work in the exact same period; fortunately for me, I have the most supportive mother-in-law in the world, who agreed to come with me to care for the two girls (2 years and 8 months, and three months). So off we go, the four of us by car (me driving).
On the first day, the event would take place a few meters away from the hotel, so I figured I’d take the little one in the sling to some of the talks so that my mother-in-law would only have the older girl to take care of. So there I was, more or less in the back of the (big) room, rocking Sophie to sleep in the sling, while my (now) good friend Greg Restall was giving a talk on Bradwardine’s solution to the Liar paradox and his notion of truth.
At Q&A, I raise my hand, and ask Greg to go back to the slide on ungrounded sentences. (He had never met me before at that point.) His reply: “Oh, you want to know what ungrounded sentences are?” Mental reply: no, I want to kick your ass and show you that there’s a serious problem with your formalization of Bradwardine. (I was doing a lot of work on Bradwardine and the Liar back then, and some of my objections to Greg’s formalization eventually made their way into a paper which appeared this year in Philosophical Quarterly.) The actual reply was not exactly like this, and we had a fruitful exchange on the point I was raising. (Those who know Greg know that there can hardly be a more feminist man than him, and he himself doesn’t know exactly why it was that he thought that the woman with the baby in the sling wouldn’t know what ungrounded sentences are.) Unfortunately, I couldn’t stay for the next talk, by my mentor Stephen Read, because Sophie had a huge poo diaper; I couldn’t impose that on the other participants.
The next day, the conference was going to be in a different, far away location, so I needed a bike to go back and forth and feed Sophie at the hotel (only breast milk straight from the source for mademoiselle… She always refused to take on bottles). I went to a bike shop, which was closed, but then I ran into someone coming out of the building who seemed to recognize me. I was pretty desperate and began to tell my story; he replied that he had seen me the day before at the conference with the baby. In fact, he had a spare bike, so why didn’t I borrow it for the day? This angel was no one other than Thomas Müller, who after that became one of my favorite people in the world (and still is) – just as the other protagonist of this story, Greg Restall.
During the rest of the conference, many people approached me to say that they saw it as a very positive thing that I came to talks with the baby. I wasn’t thinking much about it, and certainly wasn’t making a statement of any kind (at the time, I was largely oblivious to feminist concerns). So I can’t say I was being particularly brave or anything; I just didn’t think it through, it seemed convenient not to overburden my mother-in-law with two kids (ok, perhaps I was a bit clueless…). But it seems to have made a positive impression on some people at least.
Nowadays, I very much prefer to go to conferences without my children; I am fortunate to be able to count on a structure back home which survives in my absence, and I find that I can focus better on the conference if I don’t have to multi-task as philosopher and mom. But bringing my children to that particular conference (when I did not have much of a choice anyway) turned out to be a very enriching experience, and I can’t see that it did any damage to my career. Moreover, I made two new friends (Greg and Thomas), and became eternally grateful to my mother-in-law.
But perhaps it could have turned badly, so I’m not sure the moral of the story should be that everyone should be attending conferences while pregnant of with small babies. I’m sure that Brit’s and L.A. Paul’s concerns are very real, but here’s my testimony of an episode when things worked out just fine.
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