David Ruth: focus on early- to mid-career.

This year, Kristen Williams was able to attend all five days of the annual meeting of the American Physical Society (APS). And she participated in an important tutorial a day earlier – all without fretting about her four-year-old daughter.

Williams, a second-year graduate student in computational materials science at Texas A&M University in College Station, was a beneficiary of Elsevier Foundation's New Scholars grant programme, which is now in its second year. (The foundation, which supports libraries as well as early-career scholars, is an offshoot of Elsevier publishing.) The funds, which she received as an APS grant, allowed her to send her daughter to stay with family in Alabama while Williams spent six days in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

"If it weren't for the grant, I would have skipped the tutorial and gone to the meeting for only a couple days," says Williams. "My daughter would have stayed at home with her father, and I would have been thinking, 'Was it OK, was my husband able to pick her up from school today?' With the grant, I was focused at the meeting and not worrying about her."

The APS's Committee on the Status of Women in Physics is one of five organizations globally that collectively received about $200,000 recently in grant funds from the foundation. The grants are designed to help finance new programmes that will support women in science. The APS is, in turn, granting its share of those funds — which it is matching — to individual applicants for child-care costs associated with society conferences. Committee chair Mary Hall-Reno says that the APS has tried other family and child-care programmes for its annual meetings but none has been as effective as this. "It's very flexible," she says. "The child doesn't even have to be at the meeting site."

The other recipients of the New Scholars grants are the Association for Women in Science, which is developing a coaching and support programme for early- to mid-career women; the Maternal and Childcare Union of Tbilisi, Georgia, which is helping women scientists build networking and other career skills; and the European Molecular Biology Organization, the University of the Pacific and the Museum of New Zealand, all of which received child-care funds for their annual conferences.

David Ruth, foundation executive director, says the grants' focus on childcare, family issues and career advancement grew out of discussions with organizations and agencies internationally, all of which identified early- to mid-career women scientists as most likely to leave the field. They found that concerns about work-life balance were a central reason for the exodus. Ruth says the foundation is trying to spur the development of new programmes to address these conflicts, in hopes of reducing the dropout rate.