Papers, potties and pandemics: Navigating academia as a new mother during COVID-19

Dr Anna Remington is Associate Professor and Director of the UCL Centre for Research in Autism and Education (CRAE). Her work focuses on superior abilities in autism, specifically with respect to attention and perception within the condition, and how these might translate into practical benefits such as employment success. Her findings have been published in the leading journals within the field, and she is regularly invited to present her research both nationally and internationally. Anna also sits on the committee for the UCL-Wellcome Mental Health Science PhD programme as the Patient and Public Involvement Champion.

Anna is my mentor during my rotation year so I really wanted to ask her some questions about her experiences of being a senior academic, director of CRAE and a mother! I’ve been in awe of everything she does since we first met & I hope this interview can give some inspiration and advice to other women and girls wanting to pursue academia or progress their careers in academia.

Can you give us some background into your academic journey up until this point as the director of CRAE?

I originally studied Natural Sciences, specialising in pharmacology, but I realised when I started working in a lab in my final year, that I was more interested in people than in molecules (although I did really like molecules!). I took a Masters to switch over to developmental science, and that’s where I started to learn more about autism. After my Masters, I worked as a Research Assistant on a project looking at how autistic and non-autistic people process biological motion (the movement of other people/living things) and then did my PhD on attention and perception in autistic and non-autistic people. When I finished my PhD, I worked for a little while in the psychology of eating behaviours: devising interventions to help little children eat more vegetables. It’s wasn’t an obvious next step for my career, but that knowledge has been extremely useful now I’m a mum! I was then fortunate enough to secure a Postdoctoral Fellowship to continue my PhD work, and I haven’t left the autism research world since. My fellowship was at UCL, and then I was a Junior Research Fellow for a couple of years at the University of Oxford before returning to UCL in 2013 to join CRAE (initially as a lecturer, then as Associate Professor and Director).

What are your main research interests?

My main interest is in the strengths and abilities that autistic people have. I don’t think we should ignore the very real challenges that autistic people experience, but the majority of research studies focus on those. I am really interested in situations that autistic people do better than non-autistic people. Much of my research in that area focuses on attention and perception; specifically how autistic people can process more information than non-autistic people at any one time. Our findings have reframed autistic attentional differences in terms of an enhanced ability rather than a deficit. I also have a strong interest in employment. Having seen the many areas of strength, it was shocking to me that employment rates for autistic people are so low (lower than all other disability groups according to recent ONS figures). A big strand of our research looks at the employment experiences of autistic people, and how barriers to obtaining and maintaining a job can be overcome. 

Is there any exciting work going on at CRAE at the moment that you’d like to share with us?

It’s hard to choose just one project – I’m very lucky to be working on some really great studies with lots of wonderful collaborators – but one I’m very excited about is the work we’re doing on autistic disclosure in the workplace. It’s a set of studies led by my PhD student Mel Romualdez, looking at autistic people’s experiences of telling their colleagues that they are autistic. The outcomes of disclosing a diagnosis can be very mixed, so I hope our work is starting to map out what makes a difference to those outcomes, to help autistic people weigh up the decision of whether (and when) to share their diagnosis with others at work.

Outside of CRAE, what are your hobbies/interests?

My main hobby is dance! A baby and a pandemic have got in the way for a couple of years (current main hobby is Netflix) but I used to love dancing bachata, salsa and Argentine tango. I find that when I dance, I can’t think about anything else, so it’s a complete break from work and life stress!

What have been the main barriers for you as a woman in academia?

I’ve been very fortunate to have incredible mentors (female and male) who have removed barriers that might have been there for me. I’ve seen others pushed aside in favour of less qualified male peers, but it’s not something I’ve encountered (not knowingly anyway!). I have experienced the negative side of being a woman in academia though. There have been meetings I’ve been in where all the questions are directed at a male colleague, even if I am the most appropriate person to lead the discussion. Or meetings where I’ve been talked over, until a male colleague has noticed and redirected the conversation to allow me to speak. On one occasion, I was due to meet a potential funder and a male colleague (unrelated to the project) was invited along. We couldn’t work out why. After the meeting, my colleague reflected on it and suggested it was because he was male. It hadn’t crossed my mind until then, but I think he was right!  For me, something else I think is tough for women in academia is imposter syndrome. I know it’s not exclusive to women, but from chatting to colleagues and friends, the women I know seem to experience it more strongly. I’ve really struggled with imposter syndrome and it seems to get worse the more senior I get.

What are the positives of being a woman in a senior position in academia?

I hope that I can be a role model to others, and also to open doors for early career women in the way others opened doors for me. And knowing that imposter syndrome can be a real issue, I try to be a cheerleader for my colleagues, hoping that if they hear enough times how brilliant they are, they might believe it!

Have you noticed any changes in academia over time to better accommodate women working in academia?

I think there is now more awareness and understanding of the challenges that woman have in academia. We’re seeing push back against all male panels at events, and the rise of the Athena Swan charter to promote gender equality in higher education and research. Flexible working, around childcare, also seems to be more acceptable now. I think we still have a long way to go though.

What would you say are the main challenges for women in academia going forward?

Until very recently, I didn’t have any caring responsibilities, so I was able to work wherever, and whenever I wanted. I realise now how much of a privilege this was – how much I benefitted from the international conferences and the networking after hours… So even if flexible working has become more acceptable, and people are not explicitly penalised when they are unable to perform certain roles due to childcare responsibilities, there are many hidden benefits that those without such responsibilities can take advantage of. We’ve seen this over the past year within the COVID-19 pandemic: though everyone was experiencing the same restrictions, there was a huge drop in the number of journal submissions by women.

As well as all the great research you work on, you are also a mother to a young child, how is motherhood going for you?

I am loving it! I’ve always wanted to have a family, and it was a long road to this point for us, so I’m extremely grateful for my little one. He’s a lot of fun (and has shown me there is something more exhausting than grant applications)!

How has the pandemic affected your work and looking after your son?

I don’t think I can really sugar-coat this one, it has been utterly brutal! We had a place for full-time childcare from April 2020 (when I returned from maternity leave), but due to the pandemic, that place never materialised. For the first six months I had no childcare at all, and no family support (my husband is an NHS doctor so wasn’t working from home). For the second six months we had two days a week at a local childminder. It meant that for a year I had a cute (but very distracting) co-worker on all my Zoom meetings, and I had to work nights once my son had gone to bed to fulfil all my teaching and research commitments. We have now managed to find 3.5 days of local childcare, so things are better but still incredibly tough. From September we should finally have the 5 days, and I hope I can start to breathe again!

In your view, how does working in academia fit with starting a family at different stages of your career and life?

 I think that there are pros and cons to starting a family once your career is established rather than early on. For me (and I’m sure the case for many), there wasn’t a choice. I only met my husband when I was already in my 30s, so it wasn’t something I decided to delay, I’d just not had the opportunity! Chatting to a colleague who did it the other way round (children immediately post-PhD), it seems perhaps easier to do it later on. There is more stability – my early career was full of two-year postdoctoral positions – and being a PI (rather than working on other people’s projects) gives me more flexibility to shape my working week around my childcare. Having children later on also means I had a decade of being able to work whatever hours I wanted, and to follow any opportunity that presented itself, without having to take dependents into account. I benefitted hugely from this. 

On the other hand, I found taking a complete break (e.g. for maternity leave) or scaling down work (e.g. when struggling with childcare during the pandemic) was very hard. Running a research centre comes with a lot of responsibility, and I have so many students and collaborators that I didn’t want to abandon. I imagine this is harder at higher levels, compared to when you start out and don’t have so many people to support. The key for me was having an incredible Deputy Director (the wonderful Dr Laura Crane) who took everything off my plate when I was on leave, and then continued to go over and above the call of duty over the past year. It was only by working together, and covering for each other at the most tricky times, that we have managed to come through (relatively) unscathed.

Overall, however, I think the flexibility of academia makes it fit well with having a family. I really appreciate the fact that it’s not a 9-5 job, and I’m able to spend a lot of time with my son as well as put in a lot of time to my academic role. 

What advice would you give to young women pursuing a career in academia and wanting to start a family in the future?

A: My advice would be talk to people in your field who have done it and see what their experiences were. Find out what parts of the role might be more difficult to maintain, and what the best point might be to start a family for your specific field. It’s good to have realistic expectations wherever possible. It’s really hard to plan these things though, so I’d also say just go for it!

I’d also say be wary of thinking that you can return post-children with the same mindset and working in exactly the same way. I’m sure it’s different for everyone, but for me, coming back to work after having a baby meant adapting my work habits (no more long, lovely writing retreats) and planning meticulously to account for unexpected child-related drama that might get in the way of deadlines. I was prepared for that – I knew I shouldn’t expect to be the same person I was before, and I’m definitely not, and I think accepting that in advance has helped.  

Lastly, be kind to yourself: juggling both work and little ones is hard! (I probably actually need to take my own advice here a bit more… I’m working on it!)