How did you find out about Milk Stork?
I was accepted to a conference when my baby was nine months old, shortly after I had returned from work. I was excited to get back out there and a little nervous too. My baby had a dairy allergy that limited what we could feed them. I had to be strictly dairy free. I was pumping milk for daycare and direct breastfeeding when he was out of daycare. I knew going to this conference was going to be a hurdle. I didn’t want to bring him with me because I wouldn’t be able to engage in the same way. I wondered if anyone else had been faced with this problem.
As an assistant professor, it’s important to be networking, sharing your research and raising your profile. I had been trying to pump extra for months leading up to the event, but there was just no way to cover for seven days – I didn’t have enough freezer space or time. As the conference date got closer and closer, I was getting more and more nervous about what I was going to do. We couldn’t use most traditional formulas. We couldn’t use donor milk because the person had to be dairy-free. A friend who works in tech recommended Milk Stork, a benefit her company provided where she can ship the milk home to her baby while she travels. It was a perfect solution for my conference trip – flawless, easy. After I got home, I submitted my receipts, but I got an email back saying that my request to reimburse breast milk shipping was denied. After a while, I cut my losses and moved on.
How did the policy get changed to allow Milk Stork reimbursements?
I shared my experience with my faculty advisor, who said the ethos of UCSF is to support women in science, and this reimbursement seems like a pretty low-hanging fruit. I brought it to my whole department and wrote a series of emails to pretty much every committee I could find on campus, anything to do with women or equity or science. I also found the Lactation Accommodation Program which I had used on campus to pump. I emailed the program manager Caroline Carter and Dr. Ifeyinwa Asiodu, a world-famous scholar who studies lactation here at UCSF’s School of Nursing. Caroline and Dr. Asiodu were strong advocates. Caroline said Family Services was always looking to expand programming, and Dr. Asiodu was very well-connected and was able to get to the right people to reconsider the policy. I met frequently with Family Services, and a few months later, the policy was changed to allow the reimbursement explicitly. Eventually my receipts were approved. Following that progress, we’ve been thinking about funds. The School of Nursing gave some funds to support other faculty. People don’t know that the program exists, so we are trying to get the word out.
How does a service like Milk Stork support your professional career growth?
The program doesn’t cost a lot but the impact it has on people’s lives is really big. It helps develop a sense of belonging and community by making UCSF a place where we’ve thought about workers who are lactating and young families and provide the support that helps them be successful. When you look up the ladder, the further past PhD you get, the less women there are, and that effect is dramatically multiplied when women decide to have families. It disproportionately affects women, and it affects them early in their careers.
UCSF is on the leading edge. I’ve received dozens of emails from early career faculty at other universities who asked me how we got this policy changed and they are not able to make progress on their campuses. We produce the research that says that allowing breastfeeding for longer periods of time benefits the health of women and their babies. We research the ways that structures and policies affect people’s progression through their career trajectories to fix those pipeline problems. The ability to ship breast milk home was pivotal in my travel. Since they changed the policy, I’ve been able to attend two other conferences and travel internationally to meet with a collaborator in Europe. That’s how policy supports women and people capable of pregnancy advance their careers, and that matters for science.
