SPAIN: Motherhood and finishing a thesis not easy

Anna Garriga, a 28-year-old PhD student at Barcelona's Pompeu Fabre University, did not experience any problems as a woman in higher education until she gave birth to her son last August. "I feel I am being discriminated against not as a woman but as a mother," she says. "When you are young and living on a grant, you realise that the system does not allow you to have a child."

Garriga is combining her final year's work on her thesis on the sociology of families with looking after a 10-month-old baby. She took her statutory four month's maternity leave last year but has had to battle with the Spanish Education Ministry to be granted a corresponding four-month extension of the deadline for presenting her thesis.

"In the end, they agreed but they have since said that budget cuts mean they cannot guarantee this," she says. Garriga points out that in countries such as the Netherlands, women in her position are given an extra year to finish their doctorate when they have a child. Her request for a year's extension was refused.

She arrives at the university at 7.00am to get as much as possible done and still have time for her son in the afternoons. But she finds juggling studying and childcare, including breastfeeding, difficult.

"When your child is really young, you just can't work in the same way," she says, "but this has coincided with the final year of my thesis when I need to work much harder and attend conferences and the like."

Garriga is critical of Spanish universities which may have equal opportunities policies but do not provide any nursery places for employees or students. "I could really do with some childcare provision right now," she explains.

She also believes that the idea of an academic put forward by Spanish higher education is too narrow: "Someone with no family and no links who can hop from one university to the next," she says, "I think it is important that researchers should have the same life experiences as everyone else."

rebecca.warden@uw-news.com