Female medical academics hoping to smash the citation glass ceiling may benefit from financial aid to cover childcare costs so they can network and attend conferences, Australian researchers suggest.

As if the maternity leave spell wasn’t hard enough on a career, new Australian evidence shows that having children, especially two or more, negatively affects women’s research output for years afterwards.

The authors, from the Queensland University of Technology, surveyed almost 100 female researchers who had published in one of three Australian medical journals between 2007 and 2015, 60 of whom had children.

They found that women’s ability to collaborate internationally on papers dropped off after the first child and average citation counts declined after a second child.