US President's Science Advisor Announces NSF's New Family-Friendly Policies. (September 27, 2011)

John Holdren, president Barack Obama's science adviser and head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy in announcing yesterday a series of steps to be taken to reduce the number of young women who abandon scientific careers because of responsibilities outside of the workplace said: "Too many women give up because of conflicts between their desire to start a family and their desire to ramp-up their careers." His announcement read:

Today is a good day for science and technology, a good day for scientists and engineers, and a good day for the Nation.

As highlighted in a Washington Post op-ed this morning, the National Science Foundation (NSF) is announcing a major, 10-year initiative to provide greater work-related flexibility to women and men in research careers.

Among other advances, the NSF—the Nation’s major funder of research in engineering, computer science, mathematics, and other high-tech fields that will be central to U.S. economic growth in the years ahead—will allow researchers to delay or suspend their grants for up to one year in order to care for a newborn or newly adopted child or fulfill other family obligations.

That change and others being launched today at a White House event featuring First Lady Michelle Obama and NSF Director Subra Suresh aim to facilitate scientists’ reentry into their professions with minimal loss of momentum—especially women scientists, who, more often than not, are the ones who end up delaying or dropping their promising science careers because of competing family demands.

Today the White House also announced the winners of the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE)—the highest honor bestowed by the United States government on science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their research careers.

There’s a great synergy between these two announcements because these up-and-coming researchers are tomorrow’s all-stars in the making, and about 40 percent of them are women. The Nation needs all of these high-achievers, including all those women, to stick with their innovative work—to make the discoveries and design the technologies that will keep America the international science and technology powerhouse it is today.

Finally, special kudos to NSF and others in the Administration, including staff here at OSTP, for using the convening power of the White House and the Obama Administration to encourage businesses and academic and professional organizations to adopt policies similar to those that NSF is putting into place. Several are today announcing ambitious efforts in coordination with NSF’s announcement. A list of them is available here.

Writing in ScienceInsider Jeffrey Mervis reports that: The changes include allowing both male and female grant recipients to defer an award for up to 1 year or to get a no-cost extension of their existing grant. NSF also hopes to increase its use of "virtual reviews" of grant proposals so that scientists don't need to travel as often to the agency's Arlington, Virginia, headquarters. NSF will also begin to offer supplemental awards to investigators to pay for a technician to keep their lab moving forward while the investigator goes on family leave.

NSF Director Subra Suresh said "small pockets of NSF" are now offering these and similar options but that the new policy will "elevate those practices" across the entire agency. He did not estimate how much the supplemental awards would cost NSF, but said that most of the changes could be implemented "regardless of NSF's budget."

Suresh predicted that the changes will have a significant effect on the academic community that NSF serves." Among the initiative's long-term goals is "increasing the ratio of women in tenured faculty positions to a level that reflects their prevalence in the general scientific community,"