Table 1. Creative solutions should be applied to help mothers through COVID-19 and beyond.

A variety of solutions should be implemented, even if in the past they did not work as previous failures might be “false fails” due to poor timing, roll-out, communication, etc.

Problem	False Fail	Proposed Solution
Lack access to high-quality, affordable childcare	It’s too expensive to provide daycare	University provides daycare. Subsidize daycare on a sliding scale—with free daycare for graduate students, discounted daycare for postdocs, assistant professors.
Teaching requires significant time and mental space, resources that are at a minimum right now	We don’t have resources to hire new faculty to teach	Ensuring no new course development or hire postdoctoral teaching fellows
Decreased attendance at conferences	Virtual conferences are not as fun, we miss one-on-one interactions	Provide conferences in multiple modalities
Women underrepresented on Editorial Boards	Midcareer women turn down invitations to be editors due to time constraints, but men accept invitations; underrepresentation of women too hard to change.	Talk with women you invite to help brainstorm how they could participate on an editorial board. For example, could they decrease their departmental/university service level? Is it possible for them to handle fewer manuscripts? Are there incentives that could make picking up this new service more appealing (e.g., 1 free open access publication in the journal per year)
These solutions require money	Universities do not have money to implement these solutions	Universities are able to raise money for new sports arenas, buildings, and individual labs/projects. Why not for keeping women in science?