Supporting Mothers. Strengthening Scholarship.
MiRA, Motherhood in Research and 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.
A conversation across Ghana, South Africa, and the UK. Hosted by Dr. Angela Ayimbire, KNUST, with Dr. Chidochomoyo Matyatya Sango, University of KwaZulu-Natal, and Dr. Paulina Kuranchie, Newcastle University.
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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, on leave, on tenure clocks, on 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.
We lead with research because evidence is what makes deans, funders, and committees listen. The rest of our work stands on that foundation.
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.
We work with universities and institutions to reform the policies, parental leave, tenure clocks, travel, hiring, that decide whether mothers stay or leave, with decision makers and allies at the table from the start.
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 rather than relearned in private.
We open routes to funding, fellowships, and scholarships, and 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.
MiRA was founded by three academics who research, teach, and mother, and who decided the gap between those worlds was worth organising around.
The women helping build MiRA from the start, mothers stepping toward research careers, who believed in this early and are shaping what it becomes.
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.
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Our patrons are thought partners, mentors, and credibility anchors, scholars and leaders who lend their counsel, networks, and good name to MiRA's work.
Names to be announced.
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