Conference Childcare

[astra_nomer]

The abstract deadline for the winter AAS Meeting is Wednesday. Childcare grants for attendees are due November 15.

Which brings me to this item which I caught on the radio the other day. The crux of which is that annual meetings of the American Dental Association have drop-in, on-premises daycare available for parents who attend the meeting.

Having brought the family to at least one AAS meeting with me, I know what a godsend this can be. This bit from the article summarizes it nicely:

ACCENT president Diane Lyons founded her company in 1991. Before that, she was an event planner. She says she hated leaving her kids in hotel rooms with unfamiliar baby sitters on business trips.

LYONS: People didn't want to know you brought your children. They wanted your kids somewhere else, so you could be focused -- when really, it helps a parent to focus if you know your child is being well taken care of, and they're entertained.

Then again, the AAS is a lot smaller than the ADA. And I'm willing to bet that the AAS has a smaller percentage of women, who (rightly or wrongly) are more often in charge of overseeing childcare than men. So if that $50,000 figure doesn't scale well with demand, it might be hard to convince the AAS to subsidize childcare. Still, I wonder if this sort of thing might work out economically for the AAS. You could raise conference fees or apply for an outside grant or find a corporate sponsor.

Still, it is heartening to see that accomodations for childcare is becoming more commonplace.

Comments

[eowyns.livejournal.com]

Interestingly, this is actually a topic that's come up in planning for ASA (Acoustical Soc. of Amer.) mtgs which I heard about at the 'women's brunch' at the last meeting. The big problem they're having is finding the money for it. I suspect this is especially hard as the sub-disciplines that are addressed at the ASA meeting that have most women are also the ones that have less overall funding (for example the linguists and psychology crowd, vs the physics/signals crowd) and so they're also the ones who want to keep the price of the meetings as low as possible.

[astrogeek.livejournal.com]

I think a drop-in childcare would get a lot more use than the system they have now. I certainly never felt comfortable about the idea of calling up a random person with little or no background information and asking them to come to my hotel room, which may have been a 15-20 minute walk from the conference center and ask them to watch my then-infant son.

Maybe it's a discussion we should get started on the AASWomen list - what kind of childcare do people *want* at the AAS meetings?

[astra-nomer.livejournal.com]

Ooh! Good point! I'll write up a little blurb for AASWOMEN and see if I can make it into this week's newsletter.