Motherhood and academia, in the same life.
MiRA, Motherhood in Research & Academia, is an organisation of scholars working to make the academy a place where mothers can research, publish, and lead without paying for it with their careers.
The work of mothers in academia is too often kept in the footnotes. MiRA exists to move it to the centre of the page.
Academia was built around a worker with no one to care for.
The research is consistent and uncomfortable: across disciplines and continents, becoming a mother slows a scholar's publishing, lowers her odds of being hired and promoted, and quietly pushes her toward the exits, while fatherhood does no such damage. The metaphor researchers use is the leaky pipeline, and mothers are where much of the leaking happens.
The cause is structural. Academic careers were shaped around a worker with no caring responsibilities, and the policies that follow, covering leave, tenure clocks, and conference travel, assume no child is ever in the room.
MiRA was founded by academics who have lived this and chose to organise around it. Naming the problem as structural is what makes it something we can study, measure, and change.
A motherhood penalty for women. A fatherhood premium for men. The same institutions produce both.
Four commitments, anchored by the evidence.
We lead with research because evidence is what makes deans, funders, and committees listen. The rest of our work stands on that foundation.
Research & publishing
We produce and publish rigorous scholarship on the experience of mothers in academia, turning lived reality into citable evidence that policy and practice can be held to.
Policy & advocacy
We work with universities and institutions to reform the policies that decide whether mothers stay or leave: parental leave, tenure clocks, travel, and hiring. We bring decision makers and allies to the table from the start.
Mentorship & community
We connect mothers in research across career stages and institutions, so that no one navigates the hardest years in isolation, and so that experience is passed forward instead of learned again in private.
Grants & access
We open routes to funding, fellowships, and scholarships, and we help members find and win the support that keeps careers moving through the years children are youngest.
A scholarly community where a researcher can hold her work and her children in the same two hands, and where the academy changes to fit the lives mothers actually lead.
The founders.
MiRA was founded by three academics across the UK, Ghana, and Israel, who research, teach, and mother, and who decided the gap between those worlds was worth organising around. We work as a collective, sharing the labour and the leadership, and guided by a circle of patrons.
Building MiRA with us.
The women helping build MiRA from the start: mothers stepping toward research careers, who believed in this early and are shaping what it becomes.
Join the circle.
Whether you are a mother in research, a scholar of gender and the academy, an institution ready to do better, or an ally who wants this to change, there is a place for you in MiRA.
Standing with us.
Our patrons are thought partners, mentors, and credibility anchors: scholars and leaders who lend their counsel, networks, and good name to MiRA's work.
Our patrons will be announced soon.