Lab members are not family

What model of healthy relationships should be our target?

I hope it’s well established that when the principal investigator says, “Our lab is a family,” that this is a major red flag, and reason to run away as quickly as possible.

Being in a “lab family” is bad for so many reasons. First of all, the university is a workplace, not a home. Power relationships in family are different than in the workplace. People do things for family out of love, loyalty, and a sense of duty. This is often the route to exploitation, both in actual families and in academic environments. If the lab is a family, then the head of the lab will see themselves as the head of the family, when in fact they are an academic advisor and sometimes (but not always) the employer or supervisor. Entering a lab should not make you into a surrogate child, or cousin, or niece, or whatever¹. Families are often a source of joy and support and love, but another characteristic of families is a higher probability of violence, sexual abuse, coercion, disinheritance, disappointment, and other bad stuff. While there is good in supporting and caring for one’s close colleagues, adopting the model of a family provides cover for expectations and behaviors that are unhealthy and harmful.

I understand the indication towards family-ness in the lab. Gosh knows I have felt these familial tendencies towards trainees I’ve worked with. The pride in their successes, the effort invested into their development, the resources poured into their interests, the personal concern I feel when they are ill. The amount of time we spend together, not just doing science, but also socially, and involving travel to conferences and fieldwork. When I wasn’t that much older than my students, I might have pictured myself a younger uncle, and now that I am working with some students who are the exact age of my own offspring, I definitely have had feelings that are parentalesque for students under my tutelage. I think for many of us, these kinds of feelings are inevitable.

As we grow as human beings, personally and professionally, spend time with others, and grow to be concerned about them, it’s natural for some kind of emotional closeness to evolve. I don’t think it’s inherently problematic but it’s a dynamic we must be actively mindful of, because it’s a huge problem if people are provided with more academic support as a result of our personal feelings. Should some members of the lab have access to opportunities that others don’t have access to? Sure. The occasional undergrad who works in the lab four hours per week shouldn’t necessarily get the same level of support as the undergrad who is working 20 hours per week and is developing their first manuscript. A member of the lab who is experiencing health problems should get additional leeway or support to help them get through, or a person whose project requires them to learn a new technique from the PI might be spending more time with them. All those things are fine. But if preferential access to treatment and support is a result of a more personal family-like connection? Hoo boy, that’s a problem.

It suppose it’s okay to feel about some labmates as if they are family. But when you do, you should behave towards them as you would if an actual family member was in this position, keeping in mind all of the related conflicts of interest. You need to keep asking yourself, “Am I doing this for my lab member because of how I feel about them, or because it’s equitable?” It’s possible to let your feelings get out of hand, in positive, negative, or sideways directions, and if you think of the lab members as family, that amplifies the effect of your feelings rather than modulates them as other deserve.

It’s natural that we form closer personal connections with some members of the lab than with others. That’s just how personal dynamics work. Some people in the lab might be more introverted and so you interact less on a casual basis and don’t get to know them as well. Some people might have busier private lives outside the lab (perhaps, you know, an actual family) and so they’re not socializing with the lab as much. Some people will need more time or support because of their relative preparation before joining the lab. Other people might approach their time in the lab as an impersonal transactional relationship, which is perfectly fine and normal. Also, every environment has neurodiversity, and people build relationships differently from one another. So, it is inevitable that you’ll feel closer to some people in your lab rather than others. Which means that it will take a conscious effort on your part to treat every member of the lab equitably, because the quality of your training experience should not be determined by feelings of those in authority.

That said, I still occasionally invoke the ‘academic family tree’ as a metaphor describing relationships based on who we trained with. Once, when I was at the field station chatting with the PhD advisor of my own mentor from college and he pieced together our “lineage,” I jokingly said, “Grandpa!” and gave him a jocular hug. I have lots of academic “siblings” who trained in the same lab as me, some of whom I feel very close to, though others I’ve never even met. Some of my academic “cousins” are far closer to my heart than some of my sanguineous cousins (some of whom I’ve never met). This is all fine and normal. I do have reservations about leaning into academic “family trees” as this leads to homophily, intellectual inbreeding, and exclusionary behavior. For example, I feel that this figure (below) honoring the legacy of Hutchinson is as problematic as it is illustrative. As long as there are people who talk about the quality of academic pedigree (which I still hear far too frequently), we shouldn’t be putting these pedigrees on pedestals.

Edmondson 1971. [Phylogenetic tree of intellectual descendants of G.E. Hutchinson]. Limnology and Oceanography 16: 162-163

Since we know that the “family” model for a lab community is bad news, what then are the positive models that we should aspire to? When we step into a lab, what should we expect? When we are granted the authority to run a lab, what should be the model that we develop?

I don’t think there’s a name for it, and I don’t think we all need to follow the same model. One instinct is just to call it a “professional workplace,” but as the word professional is simply code for conforming to social norms, maybe not. How about “accepting and respectful workplace?” I’ve seen some labs in action that I think are good models for my own, and I’ve adopted some of their practices. Without putting a name on it, what do I think are the characteristics of a laboratory that is designed to equitably support trainees and ensure that the environment is not harmful or exploitative? Here’s my initial go:

• Clearly communicated expectations of all parties. If the trainee is employed on a project, then this work should be treated as a matter of employment. Students should have regular meetings, and mentoring agreements should be in writing. Here’s a post with lots of resources, from the Nicole Gerardo lab at Emory, and here’s an article from Beronda Montgomery about mentoring roadmaps.

• Reasonable expectations for working hours. This goes both ways, to address concerns that a trainee not be putting in enough effort, or that someone might be choosing or compelled to commit too much time to a project. The ebb and flow of research might rule out 9-5 M-F shifts, of course, but it’s unreasonable to expect too much. What’s a barometer of “too much”? If the trainee isn’t able to maintain a life outside lab involving some combination of family, friends, and generative time away from work, then this is too much to expect of anybody. If someone wants to pour their entire life into their science, that’s their choice, but we should never expect it of anybody or place others at a relative disadvantage because they’re choosing to live a balanced life.

• A code of conduct for the lab, that everybody is subject to, addressing the same kinds of stuff that are in codes of conduct for conferences and such.

• No mandatory participation in extramural activities (except maybe for a retreat that is planned well in advance).

• Components of a non-linear power hierarchy. This is hard to do given the way that most departments run training programs, that one person has a huge amount of control over the people they are training. This is why our communities are rife with abuse. How can it be set up so that grad students know that they will be able to get support from someone who isn’t their major advisor? How about a postdoc who is brought in for as particular project under one PI? What about undergrads working with a single grad student? This stuff is hard and our departments aren’t built to handle this, but whatever we can do to disrupt the concentration of power that allows one person to exploit another person without having other channels of authority and support is a step in a necessary direction.

What do think? How should this list be different? What’s a good model and label for what a healthy lab community looks like? Any resources you’d like to share, or stray ideas? Please do comment.

1. This also is one of the reasons why I grate when colleagues refer to their students as “their kids,” or “the kids.” Because these students are actual adults, who are often younger and less experienced in the world, but if we set up the expectation that they will act like kids of any kind and with any parent, then we’re doing everybody a disservice. Okay, I get it, you’ve got kids the same age as your students, and you have some paternal feelings. But not only are they not your kids, they are not kids. They’re adults who are still learning to navigate the world — as we all are. You and I are not fully baked either, you know. I look back at the person I was just five years ago — reading my own writing on here when I was in my mid/late 40s, and see how naive I was in certain ways. There is no license to call an adult of any age a “kid” if you’re in a role supporting their education and personal development. There are some folks who I know, like, and respect who call their college students “kids” or “my kids.” We just have to agree to disagree on this point, I suppose.