First impressions
In one of her first meetings as a Ph.D. candidate, a professor asked Carolyn Barnes if she was married. Was she married to a man? Was she planning on having children while completing her doctorate?

“I evaded answering,” Barnes, now in her final year, said. “And then the professor said, ‘Well, we won’t kick you out or anything, but we highly discourage anything that would hamper your progress to do your degree.’”

Following the birth of her first child, Barnes ended up putting her Ph.D. on hold for a semester to stay home. The legacy of her choice is an unexplained leave of absence on her permanent record.

“Some of my peers ended up bringing children to their offices a couple of days a week,” Barnes said. “A lot of folks who have children who don’t have childcare still have to juggle being full-time parents and trying to finish your dissertation and publish articles and get on the job market and teach and all of these things.”

Eventually, Barnes’ mother-in-law was able to come take care of her son, an option which Barnes said she and her partner knew was a privilege to have.

“That of course was a huge financial burden not just for us, but our extended family,” Barnes said. “That was wonderful to have her here. She was amazing.”

The financial burden has a number. In the state of Missouri for 2018, it is estimated that center-based care for an infant costs $9,802 annually. For home-based centers, care for an infant costs $5,708 annually.

“The graduate school is designed for elite white men who are independently wealthy, right?” Barnes said. “So, it has just become apparent as a woman, as a parent and as an ally to other minoritized students, graduate students specifically, that graduate school is not designed for us. We face—because of the institutional structures that are in place to survive—we face forms of inadvertent discrimination.”

The making of a movement
The question of offering access to free childcare is as much a question of equality as it is one of finance. Nationally, evidence points to how a lack of affordable access to childcare has a disproportionately negative impact among female-identifying employees.

The University offers its own childcare center, the Family Learning Center, which is managed by Bright Horizons. There, the full-time care cost of infants and toddlers is $1,800 per month. The full-time cost of a two-year-old is $1,800 per month while the cost of a preschool-aged child is $1,362 per month.

Higher education institutions offering access to childcare options appears to alleviate that imbalance. That access, however, comes at a cost which graduate students have long railed as too high.

The subsidies available were implemented in order to reduce the sticker cost of childcare. According to Graduate Student Senate President Thomas Howard, the subsidy scales based on the number of children in the household. For one child, the family receives $1,750 for the semester. For two, the stipend increases to $2,650 for the semester and for three, it increases to $3,550.

For parents like Barnes, the subsidy just isn’t enough.

“I’ve got it this year and I’m very grateful to have it, but it only covers one month each semester of childcare,” she said. “…We’re only able to send my son to a formal daycare, because we’re also getting help from relatives. A lot of folks don’t have that and so they turn to home care, right? That’s not licensed.”

Barnes affirmed that not every graduate student with a child would have the means for a relative to cover the cost of daycare. This financial burden, in Barnes’ mind, strikes especially hard on female-identifying students.

“This really for me is a reproductive rights issue…Regardless of how great or wonderful a partner you have, that stress and that burden still in many ways is more largely placed on women,” Barnes said. “That has major detriment to our success as graduate students and our future career, whether we want to stay in academia or not, right? Because our career inevitably takes a hit, or our finances inevitably take the hit.”

According to Howard, the problems raised surrounding parenthood stem from a lack of visibility of the issue on campus.

“I do know one of the big pushes, specifically with childcare, was for the library to have rooms or a space set aside for breastfeeding, for childcare in general,” Howard said. “Even just children’s spaces. The library decided that there wasn’t enough demand for that.”

According to Barnes, these issues exist in a network of greater concerns about access to necessary resources and spaces on campus. Nursing facilities in particular, she said, are often inadequate; they’re not always clean and some lack access to appliances like refrigerators or sinks.

“I’ve had to miss out on a lot of educational opportunities, conferences, all these kinds of things. Because even when I came back to work, this multi-billion-dollar University doesn’t take necessary steps to really facilitate my full participation,” Barnes said.

Stretched too thin
Meredith Kelling knew she would likely have a child while working on her Ph.D. What she didn’t anticipate was how becoming a parent would alter her perception of what it means to be a graduate student.

“I didn’t experience any direct discrimination,” Kelling said. “No one said anything microaggressive to me about my choice to have a baby, but it’s not a system that supports people who have responsibilities outside of graduate school. And I think that those sorts of obligations disproportionately fall to women more often than they do fall to men.”

137 families are currently enrolled at the Family Learning Center. While Kelling was able to enroll her child in the Center, the cost significantly impacted her expenses. As she explained it, time becomes money at certain times. Kelling said her entire graduate stipend goes towards paying for childcare.

“When I think, ‘Okay, I need to come up with over $1,500 a month for child care’ I think, ‘how many cases of my freelance job am I going to have to do to do that. How much time is that going to take away from my studying for my degree?’” Kelling said. “The bottom line is that, if I didn’t have that line item on my budget, I would have that much more time to study. Like I would have that before-time to finish my dissertation on time. I’d have that much more time to research.”

The Washington University Graduate Workers Union (WUGWU) began a campaign to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour for all campus workers during the fall of 2018. Parallel to this campaign was another movement: guaranteeing free childcare for Washington University workers.

After years of campaigning, a part of their demands were met, albeit not for graduate students. This summer, Chancellor Andrew Martin announced that all regular employees and basic service contractors would be raised incrementally until it was at $15 an hour by 2021.

The status of on-campus childcare options was not addressed. During the decision-making process, Martin and his administration assessed the state of childcare and campus and determined not to make any changes.

“We decided to continue to provide our current child care options, including child care subsidies for graduate students and to leave to the proper channels—namely our Graduate Student Council—consideration of other issues,” Martin wrote in a statement to Student Life. “I do not expect any further announcements beyond what I shared in my message in July.”

Kelling participated in several WUGWU rallies for raising the minimum wage and guaranteeing free childcare for campus employees. When she sat at the table with members of the administration to discuss the organization’s demands, the traditional values of the University shone through.

“They kind of balked at the idea of free childcare,” Kelling said. “I think that this has a lot to do with some very traditional thinking about women in the workplace that like, ‘This is your choice to have children, and there are consequences to your choice’….putting that onus on a woman’s career is a gender problem, is a major, major act of subtle discrimination that makes women choose between careers and making sure that they’re holding together their personal lives.”

For Kelling, the question of access to free childcare on campus is derived from the greater issue of increasing diversity in graduate programs. This is a question in which she is deeply invested.

“These questions [of] who belongs in graduate school, who belongs at the table of academia. It seems that that has always privileged white, heteronormative, heterosexual, economically-privileged men and kind of silence everybody else,” Kelling said. “It’s not just a matter of saying, ‘Oh, we’re operating in the spirit of diversity’…It’s actually establishing frameworks to make sure that the people who aren’t showing up, when you figure out why, are able to be supported in a way that is equitable with the people who already can come to that table very easily.”

The Family Learning Center did not respond to comment requests.