The Importance of Maternal Well-Being and Workplace Equity

I often tell my students that when I was younger, I would have never imagined that as a professional I would excel in entertaining babies and “herding cats”—critical skills in my line of work as a psychologist who studies child development. As a professor in the Washington State University (WSU) department of psychology, I spend a substantial amount of time in research activities, which for me involve measuring early temperament—how infants typically react to different situations and are starting to regulate these responses.

The first one is a must, because babies who come to the Temperament Lab expect entertainment, especially as they are being fitted with EEG caps and electrodes. “Herding cats” is something that comes with the territory when collaborating with other researchers and working on policy issues and career development for other faculty, in the context of my duties with ADVANCE at WSU—a set of programs dedicated to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

At first glance, it appears that my interest in infancy and temperament development and the latter set of responsibilities do not have a lot in common, but upon a closer look, the overlap, in fact, exists with respect to maternal-child health and related issues.

After having my daughter in 2008, I was drawn to issues around pregnancy, maternal well-being, stress, and impacts on offspring temperament. I am busy studying related factors in my research life, and in terms of my work for ADVANCE at WSU, attempt to support work-life balance, so that WSU women faculty are able to feel like they can be there for their children to support their development, while fulfilling their professional obligations.

Related issues have become even more critical with the COVID-19 outbreak, sheltering in place, and working from home. I constantly hear from my women faculty colleagues that even though their male counterparts have similar professional demands, they are able to be more productive at home, due to having fewer child-rearing and domestic responsibilities. Even with the recent extension of the tenure clock, which gives everyone seeking this first critical promotion in academia an additional year, women may end up at a disadvantage, as many believe that men will be able to generate more publications and grant proposals while working from home, accruing a more impressive record prior to tenure review.

I share these concerns and offer support to those who apply for one of our many programs aimed at promoting scholarship, building leadership skills, and supporting work-life balance. At the same time, I am soliciting proposals from WSU researchers interested in studying COVID-19, work-life balance, and productivity issues, to understand these better in an academic workplace and for other professions. We are also sharing “best practices” for supporting women scientists across the Pacific Northwest, thanks to a recent Partnership grant from the National Science Foundation.

I will be writing about these efforts in upcoming posts, but for now I’ll say a bit more about my current research related to maternal-child health. My longstanding interest in cross-cultural research (no doubt, a function of growing up in Russia, the process of immigration and acculturation in the U.S.), was recently brought together with the maternal-child health area of study in a paper published together with Carolina de Weerth and other colleagues, entitled "Is prenatal maternal distress context-dependent? Comparing United States (US) and the Netherlands." Briefly, we found that women in the third trimester of pregnancy in the U.S. reported significantly greater depression and anxiety relative to their Dutch counterparts.

Although further research is required, this difference can be understood as resulting from discrepancies in work-related accommodations and access to care (e.g., universal health care and doula services in particular, available in the Netherlands). We previously found U.S. babies were fussier and more difficult to soothe compared to Dutch children, and are currently writing a grant proposal to try and understand if the recently reported pregnancy well-being differences are related to these infant outcomes that favor the Netherlands. We are also starting investigations examining the impact of COVID-19 on the well-being of pregnant women, so stay tuned for preliminary findings from this research.