I’m a huge fan of podcasts and audiobooks. I’m an auditory learner, and soaking up some new knowledge or hearing others’ ideas while sorting laundry or vacuuming or making beds or doing any of the otherwise banal chores of everyday life is an oasis of sorts. I do love reading a good old-fashioned bound paper book, but I struggle to carve out time to do that most days. One of my recent favorite audiobooks is Mom Genes: Inside the New Science of Our Ancient Maternal Instinct by Abigail Tucker
Tucker reports on and summarizes recent research that has begun scratching the surface of understanding what actually happens- physically, chemically, behaviorally- when women become mothers. She weaves the research together with personal stories and reflections that ground and reify the findings in light of real-life experiences of motherhood. I initially imagined structuring a piece about this book as a summary of what findings surprised me and what findings didn’t. But the truth is that very little of it surprised me, and I suspect many mom’s would say the same. Of course, some of the very technical mechanisms that are involved in the changes that women undergo in motherhood one might call surprising, in the sense that one was may not have been previously aware or knowledgeable about this particular set of genetic or hormonal or neurochemical actors and processes, but I think many of us would nod our heads at the overall patterns and outcomes reported in the research. Maybe that is what surprised me most is that I found myself nodding and thinking “yup, that’s the kind of thing I thought was going on” for many of the biological aspects of this process of becoming a mother.
I know in this era it’s often frowned upon to look squarely at and acknowledge biological differences between men and women, and in this case between men, women, and women who have become mothers. In this case, the research addressed in the book is by nature centered on these reasonably distinct categories based on relevant biological characteristics, primarily the producer of large sessile gametes who gestates the developing embryo, which we call female, and the producer of small, motile gametes that are capable of fertilizing the female gamete and who themselves do not gestate, which we commonly call male. I am not addressing any debates about gender identity or commenting at all on how we understand transgender individuals in this sphere. Here, I’m just interested in talking about this interesting research and what it might mean for women, our careers, our families, culture, and institutions. Suffice it to say I have respect and compassion for all humans. I have only so much ability to focus on one set of challenging enough topics at once, so Im keeping my focus narrow here, in alignment with the findings of the research on this biological process of conception, pregnancy, birth, and maternal care. By nature, this requires that we talk generally about the portions of the population we call, biologically, gametically (is that a word? it should be!), male and female.
The author points to research at a variety of levels of biological organization, in a variety of systems- from hormones to sensory apparatus to brain tissue- that indicate that women who become mothers undergo major, multi-lateral changes to their morphology, physiology, nervous system, and behaviors from conception onward, with the nature of the changes varying at each stage of maternity and continuing well after birth. Among the studies that compared changes in female parents to changes in male parents, across biological levels, most found that the changes experiences by women were significantly different to those of males; in some cases women experienced changes not observed at all in males, while in others, the changes in females were much greater in degree than in males. This is the part where so many moms out there nod their heads- if not sarcastically slap their foreheads- in agreement. Indeed many would not be surprised by the pattern of these findings, but indeed the work in understanding the mechanisms and extent of these changes and the sex-specific differences, is fascinating and novel itself.
I’d encourage anyone who is interested to read (or listen to) the book because it covers so much. I have no interest, nor right, to summarize it here given the exceptional work done by author Abigail Tucker. But I am interested in talking about what it means. As a scientist, I think the strongest ground to stand on is scientific evidence. By that I don’t mean merely evidence put forward by a scientist, but evidence that is attained through rigorous application of the scientific methods. For so long, it seems, those of us who have wanted to make the case for our families, societies, cultures, institutions, and employers supporting the unique situation faced by mothers in a way that is consistent with the reality that we’ve observed and experienced as mothers had to rely on a limited set of evidence. Look, we’d say, you can see that when you implement policies that treat female and male parents as the same, you are not truly supporting women fairly, because we can see that women who become mothers undergo a somewhat if not vastly different experiences, set of changes and challenges, than male parents. We’ve experienced it, the social science and polling research points to it (e.g., research on differences in time spent in childcare and household work between male and female partners in married heterosexual couples). Look, we’d say, these is a reason that so-called “family-friendly” policies meant to support women- such as tenure clock stoppages- are not working and in fact widening the gap between females with children, the demographic least likely to attain tenure at academic institutions, while further enhancing the success rates for males with children, who have among the highest tenure success rates, because female parents experience fundamentally different demands and challenges. We’ve all seen it, we say. But here, with the results of fascinating and compelling scientific research, do we perhaps have another /straw weighty enough to at least cause the camel to bend, even just a bit?