Marine scientist Maria Granberg gave birth to her first child in 2006 and took roughly a year off at 80% pay. But in 2010, when she became pregnant with her second child, she was at a more challenging career stage. By then an assistant professor at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, she was building momentum, planning research activities and establishing collaborations - and had yet to recruit staff for her lab to keep the research moving in her absence. In addition, her research on marine-sediment bacteria involved work with solvents that are unsafe to handle during pregnancy. Neither her department nor her granting body, the Swedish Research Council Formas, could offer her funding for a lab assistant. Between a pregnancy that restricted her work and six months of partial maternity leave, she lost a full season of field samples and a year of work. The losses resulted in missed publication opportunities and altered her long-term plans for the project. "That's a very stressful thing," she says. "The pregnancy comes along and kind of disturbs your plan."
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