"You should work at home in the evenings"

[WhatPostDoc]

This is probably more of a rant. I'm a lab-based post doc, earning approx £36K, contracted 37.5 hours but easily work more (often an hour a day plus sometimes a few hours on weekends). Today my boss berated me in a meeting with lots of colleagues about the progress of my project. To be clear everyone else had just finished saying how good everything is, and he himself had to admit the standard of work was good but he thinks it's unacceptable there isn't more of it. Others in the meeting pulled me aside after to reassure me I have plenty and he is being a knobhead. He lives to work, no spouse, no children, no annual leave.

He apparently thinks I'm not doing enough and that I should just do work in the laboratory during the day, and do all the analysis and writing up etc. in the evenings after dinner. He also wants me to cancel my annual leave this summer (first holiday with baby) and not take any annual leave until the progress is 'acceptable'.

My first instinct is to tell him to fuck off and I don't get paid any where near enough for this! If he wants to work every evening on his professor salary he can knock himself out but I want to spend time with my little one thank you very much! But that's not going to do wonders for our working relationship. Any tips on how to handle this?

My female colleagues with DC generally have a pattern of keeping their career ticking over at a low level while their DC are young.

Not true in my area. Many female colleagues with children progress very rapidly through the ranks to become senior professors, as I did. I have always managed a work/life balance and certainly don't expect people to work evenings routinely and not take annual leave.

Agree - I am a professor (promoted when my child was early primary age) and a single parent and have always had a decent work life balance, including part-time working. It is do-able.

it is the PIs responsibility to make sure that the work allocated to a researcher on a grant can be done in normal working hours. The problem is with his project management, not your use of time.

Only working the set 37.5 hours a week is not going to get anyone anywhere in any professional career.

Where did you conjure up this bullshit from? I'm making the assumption that as a professor you have only ever worked in academia, so this is your only reference point. You absolutely can have a traditionally successful career working within contracted hours. The culture in academia is so fucked up.

UKRI are also trying to work harder on research culture OP, so if the funding is from them you can report it to the email [email protected]

Wow, they are working an extra hour a day every day and a few hours on the weekend - this is an entire extra working day per week.
If working 6 full-time days a week isn't enough for a job then that's a fault with the job, not with the OP not knowing how to "accelerate marvellously" - what patronising language.

Its not a failing on the part of the OP to not do more than 1/5 of her week again OVER what shes paid for.

@UsingChangeofName this is a false and dangerous philosophy.

He may not have intended to disadvantage women. However, we need to evaluate actions by their outcome not their intent. If an action, policy, practice etc. - like expecting people to work evenings - disadvantages women relative to men (for example, because more women relative to men have child care responsibilities) then it is sexist. This is whether or not someone intended to be that way.

Compated to men, women are more likely to be negatively impacted by the expectation of uncompensated uncontracted out-of-hours work because they are more likely to take on a greater number of hours of unpaid housework and child care.

So it is sexist because the expectation disadvantages women relative to men. Women are less likely to be able to meet the expectation and will have poorer results compared to men. Its all statistics really.

This is academia. It's not going to change for you. You can fight it and not win, ignore it and continue as you are, or conform. But working evenings and weekends is literally what most lecturers upwards are doing.

It is quite depressing how little some things change. I was told (after returning F/T after 5mo mat leave some years ago now) that I had shown I wasn't serious about my career any more as I wasn't willing to stay late every evening and work weekends.

Prof didn't seem to notice that nurseries close in the early evening and babies need feeding and love and reading to etc., and that he'd got to Prof because he had a wife to do all the wifework and mental load and bring up his children... I also recall him working while on holiday on some beach or other.

OP do what is right for your family. End of. If your Prof is that bothered about getting more work done, how's he going to cope if you're not there at all ? You've got your PhD. There are more family-friendly alternatives and don't feel guilty about exploring them.

"Only working the set 37.5 hours a week is not going to get anyone anywhere in any professional career. Any professional career - if you define "getting anywhere" as getting his "professor's salary""

@BlueHeelers this is another falsehood, pushed by academia. I work 38 hours a week, exceed expectations and get paid more than most professors.

Academia is toxic and this narrative - which is as old and accepted as time, but still false - helps keep academic postdocs, PhDs and other precarious research and teaching staff susubjugated. "Just do more, sacrifice more, and you will be rewarded." The system is the problem, not the OP.

It's not just academia. Teaching in general, medicine, law, finance ... old skool professions

His behaviour is bullying and unacceptable. Take jt up with hr.

@Chickplz I've PM'd you.

Also why I left academia (and lab research altogether).

I remember a Professor in our uni, one of the youngest ever, telling is about how and why his career was so successful.

luck. He’d spent a long time on his research getting nowhere, until one day he fucked up and ran the wrong half of his isolate (the part he was supposed to bin). There was a protein in there that was key to his whole hypothesis and turned his career round overnight.

that’s the thing with research. You can put 60 hour weeks in for years and get nothing. Not because you aren’t working hard enough or aren’t doing it right. Then you have two or three year contracts so are there is pressure to get results of not have your contract renewed.

Toxic is not my experience of academia (yes really).
OP: talk to your colleagues. They will probably agree he's a pillock & they will give you support to resist stupid expectations.
Even in academia you don't have to work crazy hours. Maybe if you want to become world-leading professor but that isn't your role or desire right now if I understand correctly.

The sexism you mention there is coming from the parents of the child(ren) if they expect the woman to do more of the parenting because she is a woman.

That really isn't the case for all couples you know.

@UsingChangeofName this is 100% right. Sexism constrains women's choices and shapes their experience in the home too. Women face sexism everyday in many different ways. That's why we need to call it out - understand nuance - and continue to fight for equality. Yay feminism!

It's great that some women have equal division of labor in the home, sadly - as research shows - many do not. I'm glad you called out this area as something to work on too! Reminds me of some work about what men can do to help women's career choices: help out at home more. It's like when you think of "improving health" there are many aspects that can be worked on.

That being said, as this thread is focused on a PI's behaviour, we should call out how that behaviour disadvantages the women workers in his lab. Managers and organisations have responsibility to support women's career choices and trajectories by not introducing barriers that disproportionately affect women. Hence Athena Swan guidelines etc. Sadly, this is a huge issue in academia and beyond 😪

I agree with checking to see what your School’s Athena SWAN status is. Many Athena SWAN awards require all meetings to be held in core hours and beyond that the toxic behaviour you describe grossly violates the spirit of the award, and probably its letter as well. Do seek out your rep (if you have an award).

Are you in a trade union? If not, join today. Good luck!

I have no practical advice to offer but I've seen similar behaviour in a former, small and non-academic, workplace. A female manager (married with kids) berated a male staff member for not staying behind to finish work, in front of the rest of us.

She would often do 13 hours a day and expected everyone else to do the same.
The man was married with a child at nursery and had to leave at fixed times to pick his daughter up.

He told her "I work to live, not live to work.
If the company pays for extra nursery hours I'll stop behind when necessary".

The curious feature of this situation was that the usual sex dynamic was reversed 😆

Anyway, your boss had no business talking to you that way, especially not in front of other people - it's a form of bullying to try to use group shaming.

Postscript: I once spoke to my manager about her own hours and she replied that if she didn't work so long, the jobs would never get done. I advised her that the company needed to hire someone else if that was the case and that by willingly working so many hours she was letting the company off the hook, to her own detriment.

Eventually, exhaustion forced her to scale back. Then after a decent inheritance, she bought an old farmhouse and opened a camping barn and B&B.

This. I don't work evening or weekends except during exceptionally busy periods (maybe 1-2 weeks/year, usually before a funding deadline). I also occasionally leave work an hour early to go to a gym class or the like, so it averages out as normal working hours. Most of my colleagues are the same. I'm glad I work in a department where people are expected to have a life outside work and where weekend working is more likely to raise eyebrows than not working weekends. OP, if your current place of work won't change then I hope you can find somewhere with a healthier approach to work-life balance.

Wow this had a lot more replies than I was expecting! Thank you for all the advice.

Firstly, I am aware academia often involves long hours, I already work above and unsociable hours when needed, I've come in at 3am because I've had a call saying there is an alarm going off on one of the important bits of equipment. I work hard and that is evident by my publications. The fact my PI thinks this isn't enough is just boiling my piss.

Second, my school is apparently Athena Swan Silver. Most people are great, no meetings outside of hours unless with an international collaborator, no expectation to reply to emails outside of set times etc. I worked briefly with my PI years ago and wasn't like this, so why he's picked now to be a dickhead is beyond me.

Third, lots of people checked on me the past couple of days. Including people who weren't in the meeting, asking me how it's going and how great my work is. PI has not apologised but I think maybe someone has had a word as he has largely avoided me since and in the few times we have spoken, though he has been somewhat short/terse/to the point, it hasn't been overtly unprofessional.

So basically he's being like Sheldon Cooper in the sense is that the research etc should be the be all so to speak

Athena SWAN Silver! OP , the fate of your School is in your hands. The odds are your project lead is violating a core hours meeting requirement and there are multiple witnesses to his appalling behaviour towards you. His suggestions about revising your work/life pattern coupled with his abuse of power may well be enough to kill or amend the award should they become known. People probably are genuinely supportive and probably do like you, but they are also aware of this.

What do you want for an outcome? Probably not to kill the award, and probably not to make a long term enemy of a powerful professor. In your place I would be talking with that AS rep immediately. They have a vested interest in maintaining the award. You can be supportive of that goal, if you are, whilst making it clear that it must be done honestly with respect to your circs.

Just adding my support and remember there are plenty of senior academics who haven't had to sell their soul to the workplace to get ahead. Me included. You should have a life outside of the lab, for all the reasons already so eloquent expressed.

This kind of behaviour is not that unusual in departments that have Athena SWAN awards. Indeed my experience is that sometimes the departments with silver status have worse cultures than those with bronze but are better at writing their applications. The Advance HE panels who assess AS applications do not come to talk to people working in the departments. The new format for AS applications is less specific about required content and it allows departments to redact and conceal issues, with the emphasis put on successful actions. I'm not really sure what posters think is going to happen by reporting it to AS reps, who typically have very little influence or power in the departments. Personally I would be going directly to the department management group.

@acfree123 My understanding is that the AS rep is the conduit to the SLT for AS issues, but perhaps that is particular to my School.