If childcare goes - because of the pandemic and because of our indifference - no one who comes after me will be able to do it. We will not have senior professors who are moms.

We will not have them giving talks at our institutes (when talks come back). We will not have them asking questions in our seminar rooms. We will not have their books to read and assign to our students.

And we will lose many other working mothers, too. Staff. Graduate students. Assistant professors. Lecturers.

Universities don’t care about this. But I really, really do.

Here’s something I wrote (before COVID) about having small children as a professor. It already seems like an artifact of a different time. I can’t imagine what it’s like now. https://www.amy-stanley.com/blog-1/how-you-do-it