UC Santa Cruz faculty mothers say lack of child care is hurting their academic careers

When Natalia Ocampo-Peñuela was offered a job as assistant professor of environmental studies at UC Santa Cruz in 2021, she and her husband, Scott Winton, immediately started looking for child care for their two children for the fall of that year. 

The family was living in Colombia, where Ocampo-Peñuela is from, and started calling dozens of child care providers in the Santa Cruz area. What they encountered is a problem that many parents across the county are facing, but one that a group of UCSC faculty members say poses a particular hazard to young academics still climbing the career ladder, especially mothers. 

Child care providers often didn’t return calls or placed them on endless waitlists. Desperate for a spot for their 6-month-old son, the couple offered a child care center $2,000 as a deposit to be placed on a waitlist. A few months later, a fellow faculty member told them they’d had a bad experience at that center and suggested the family consider other options. The center didn’t return the deposit.

“So, out of anxiety, we ended up throwing away like a month’s worth of child care,” said Winton. “It was stressful.” 

The couple eventually found a part-time nanny for their son, while their 2-year-old daughter was accepted into the Neighborhood Childcare Center, a nonprofit bilingual preschool. Winton, then commuting to Palo Alto for postdoctoral training at Stanford University, filled in the gaps where he could. (He’s also now an assistant professor of environmental studies at UCSC.)

While they felt lucky as colleagues stayed on waitlists or pieced together multiple providers, during that first year, the family spent about $4,200 a month for child care. 

“Every penny that I made, I transferred directly to child care,” said Ocampo-Peñuela.

Winton and Ocampo-Peñuela aren’t alone in the stress and anxiety they describe as UCSC academics seeking accessible and affordable child care. Santa Cruz County lost about 1,100 child care spaces serving children under age 6 between 2016 and 2023, according to the Childhood Advisory Council of Santa Cruz County, likely due to the pandemic. More than half of the children who need child care don’t have a spot, and the county is short nearly 3,000 spaces for infants and toddlers.

Those who work and teach at UCSC say their careers, and therefore their livelihoods, are particularly at risk from the lack of affordable and accessible child care options in the county.

UC Santa Cruz is the only University of California school among the nine residential campuses without a child care program that serves faculty and/or staff – the UCSC program currently serves only undergraduate and graduate students and has about 62 slots. 

Faculty mothers at UCSC say they face unique challenges compared to some other UC campuses, driven by the region’s high cost of living, expensive child care and limited day care spots. And they say it’s affecting their career prospects as many female academics feel pressured to choose between caring for their children and furthering their careers.

And while graduate students saw a nearly 27% increase in child care reimbursements — to $1,400 a quarter — this past October after a 2022 strike, UCSC faculty don’t receive any child care subsidy. 

The result is that many of the school’s faculty mothers, particularly with children under 2½ years, simply can’t afford to pay for child care and end up scaling back their work hours when their children are young, hampering their efforts to progress in their careers, said Lindsey Dillon, an assistant professor of sociology at UCSC. 

“They’re working 15 to 20, maybe 25 hours a week, and they’re doing a job that is an over-40-hour-a-week job,” she said. “So what that means is that it might take longer to get tenure, people aren’t getting promoted at the same rate as other peers.” 

The challenges of accessing affordable local child care in Santa Cruz have inspired more than 60 faculty members, known as the UCSC Academic Mothers, to push for a child care subsidy for tenured and tenure-eligible faculty. The group originally formed in 2016 to advocate for better policies for faculty parents — specifically mothers. 

After finalizing their proposal during a group meeting Monday, Dillon, who chairs the group, says they plan to make a proposal similar to what graduate students recently won through their strike at the end of 2022. Until the campus provides staff and faculty child care – through the center that will be built at Student Housing West – faculty are requesting a $1,350 child care subsidy to offset costs of finding care for children under 5 years old. 

Dillon said the faculty union will present the proposal at the union’s next labor relations meeting with campus administration in about a month. 

A 2022 study by the Eos Foundation found that UCSC is a leader among universities when it comes to promoting women in leadership – about 36% of full tenured professors at the school are women, the highest among the eight UCs included in the study.

But Dillon says the fact that 36% was considered high among the universities included in the Eos Foundation study exemplifies the problem. “This is actually really significant – that there are so few full professors and speaks to how raising kids delays people’s careers, and finances,” said Dillon. 

Dillon is pre-tenure and has a 2½-year-old son. When he was born, she used her paid maternity leave and then had a reduced work load, but also had to work on finishing and publishing her book. She and her partner had no child care until their son was 6 months old, and then they were able to get just 12 hours of care a week.

“I was working constantly trying to find a balance,” she said. “I think maybe one of the particular issues for academic mothers is that there can be a lot of flexibility and so we can absorb the lack of child care by just being the child care, being the caregiver. But our jobs and our bodies and our psychological well-being suffers.”

In a spring 2023 survey of UCSC’s Academic Mothers, 16 of 17 respondents said they missed career opportunities because of the challenges and stress of child care. One respondent said that they advanced in their career and received tenure, but their physical health suffered. 

Others said they declined invitations to conferences, fell behind on research and lab work and delayed book publications. Some said the quality of grant proposals and student mentoring diminished and they declined invitations to apply to leadership roles. 

“I can’t even write a comprehensive list of the missed opportunities,” wrote one mother of two children, citing missed deadlines for important career-making proposals and turning down speaking invitations. Because she didn’t have enough time to complete publications, she said she passed over being the first author to students and postdocs, giving them the prestige of having contributed the most work to the pieces. 

In an interview with Lookout in January, Campus Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Lori Kletzer said child care is a “deeply concerning issue” for all employees at UCSC and that the administration is reviewing the idea of a child care subsidy that the Academic Mothers group previously raised during a faculty meeting in November. 

“We are analyzing their proposal,” she said. “I take their proposal very seriously.” 

However, she said the university’s primary focus in addressing child care right now is building the child care center at the Student Housing West project on Hagar and Coolidge drives at the base of campus. 

The new center has been in the works for years. The university says the center will offer 140 spaces for the children of students, faculty and staff once it’s completed. Construction is slated to begin this spring after years of delays due to litigation.

“I’m not trying to simplify, and say, ‘That’ll solve everything,’” Kletzer said. “But that can significantly change the situation for our employees who have children, and we really, really have to lead with that.” 

Dillon said faculty and staff have needed this center for years and they’re grateful that the university is pushing forward with the project. However, she says they are still concerned about affordability and accessibility when it comes to the new center. 

Kletzer said the university is still determining what the child care center’s rates will be and that it’s too early to know how many of the slots will be full-time and part-time. 

Associate Professor of Latin American Literature Amanda Smith moved to Santa Cruz in 2016 for an assistant professor position, and she started the job when her twins were about 8 months old. She found a list of child care providers and called every single one. None of them had two spots. 

Some providers told her she could start paying for one of the spots to reserve it – prior to her arrival in Santa Cruz – and when another spot opened up she would get the second spot. 

“They wanted me to start paying well in advance of moving here to hold a spot for me,” she said. “I wasn’t working when my kids were born before I started this job, so technically I was below the poverty line for a family of four. This was really, really hard.”

Smith kept calling providers and finally found a small home day care that would take both of her kids four days a week for a total of $2,200 a month – much below the rates she found elsewhere. They spent $2,200 for on-campus housing. 

Her take-home pay was $4,600, and with her husband, Grant Whipple, who was able to teach art at UCSC twice a year, they barely covered expenses. Whipple applied for teaching positions and in the meantime helped with child care. 

“That was really stressful,” Smith said. “I pushed through because I had to because if I didn’t get tenure I wasn’t going to have a job. What suffered was my mental health.”

Smith spent the next four years barely scraping by – and because of that, applying to jobs at other universities because she felt it was unsustainable to live in Santa Cruz and pay for child care and rent. “All I thought about was money all the time,” she said.

Eventually, things got better. Her husband got an assistant teaching professor position and their kids started attending public school, which brought down costs – but not entirely. Their kids are now at DeLaveaga Elementary School, where they go to after-school programs for $1,000 a month. Smith said it’s a great program and that there are over 100 families on the waitlist for it. 

“You have to pay for after-school care if you have work to do,” she said. “And that is also expensive.” 

Smith says she hopes that others won’t have to experience the struggles she faced while she was a parent of young children. She and other faculty members say this is a retention issue and a diversity issue, because faculty who can’t afford child care care and who don’t come from generational wealth will not be recruited. 

“I want everyone to be able to work here because I think it’s such a great place to work. I think it’s a really special university,” she said. “And I want to see us set the precedent so that we can practice what we preach.” 

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