Dear Anne-Sylvie, dear Genevieve, dear James,

We are writing in our capacity as the two 'Early Careers, Gender and Diversity' (ECGD) officers of the LHCb collaboration. One of our tasks is to convene meetings during Collaboration weeks at which topics of concern that impact upon young colleagues, women physicists and minority groups within LHCb can be addressed.  At our most recent meeting in February we discussed the challenges faced by physicists on limited term contracts, in particular fellows, who wish to start a family.  We understand that CERN is conducting a five-yearly review of its employment strategy and believe that the opinions expressed in our meeting would be useful input to this process.

We concentrated our discussion mainly on CERN Fellowships that provide the opportunity to produce career-defining research. Currently, CERN Fellows who take maternity leave lose a substantial fraction of this research time and hence of the opportunity to kick-start their scientific career. We therefore suggest that their contract should be extended by the amount of maternity or paternity leave taken.
Special attention should be given to women starting their maternity at the end of a fellowship that cannot be extended. The same principles should apply to adoption.
In order not to create a disincentive for hiring women through this measure, we suggest that the cost of the contract extension is covered by a central fund, rather than the budget of the group or department that employs the fellow.

On the same meeting, LHCb colleagues felt that the existing provisions for paternity leave provided by CERN are inadequate, and we encourage the review to investigate whether improvements can be made in the same spirit. We also suggest that identical entitlement should be made available to unmarried and same-sex couples.

Finally, in our meeting we discussed also the case of long-term illness and of caring of a relative or partner, and we were wondering if what stated above could be extended also to these cases.

We hope that these suggestions can be considered during the review process.  We also note that they are supported by the Spokesperson and Deputy Spokesperson of the collaboration, who attended out meeting and are CCed in this message.


Best regards,


            Barbara Sciascia and Jonas Rademacker
        Early Carer, Gender and Diversity officers of LHCb