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Spousal Hiring in Academia
I'm curious what people here think about spousal hiring in academia. It's a topic that I have thought a lot about without reaching any firm conclusions so I thought it might be interesting to discuss it here. Since the practice might not be well known to people outside of academia, I'll explain how it works before sharing some of my own thoughts.
Spousal hiring is meant to address a common problem in academia: academics are often in romantic relationships with other academics and it can be hard for them to both find a job in the same city. The reason this is hard is that academic jobs are unusually spread out. Even the biggest cities have no more than about 10 major research universities—for mid-sized cities there's often only one—and even a large department at a major university may only hire a couple faculty members per year. Some people call this the "two-body problem" but I kind of hate that name. Regardless, this can be a major source of frustration for people in academia and some couples spend years living far apart from each other because of it.
To deal with this problem, it has become increasingly common for universities to offer spousal hires. When a university wants to hire a researcher whose romantic partner is also in academia, they will sometimes also make a job offer to the partner (note that I said partner not spouse; in spite of the name, there is almost never a marriage requirement). Sometimes, the partner is hired as a tenure-track professor. Other times, they are given some kind of less prestigious position, like lecturer (a teaching-only role with lower salary and no tenure). Often, they would not have considered hiring the partner if not for spousal hiring. There is a related situation that is sometimes also referred to as spousal hiring where a researcher at a university starts a new romantic relationship with a researcher at another university and asks their current university to offer a job to their new partner. See here for a much more detailed account of how spousal hiring works on a practical level.
You might wonder what's in it for the university. The answer is basically that this is a way for lower-ranked universities (or even just not-literally-Harvard universities) to recruit better researchers than they would be able to otherwise. So usually spousal hires are only made on behalf of researchers somewhat better than the typical researcher hired by that university. Some universities also view it as a way to guarantee that professors will stick around for longer. Not all universities are big on spousal hiring, and even when they are it makes the whole process more complicated. So if you are an academic couple who managed to get jobs at the same university due to a spousal hire, you might be less inclined to go through the whole job search process again just to move to a slightly more prestigious university.
My impression is that in the past, spousal hiring was frowned upon or even outright forbidden due to concerns aobut nepotism (see here for a reference to this). Nowadays, however, it is common, at least in the US and Canada. I personally know of several examples and have heard anecdotes about at least a dozen more.
I have mixed feelings about spousal hiring. On the one hand, it can be very frustrating to not be able to find a job in the same city as your romantic partner. On the other hand, there are some obvious negative aspects:
I think spousal hiring mostly continues (and remains reasonably popular) because it's so convenient for many of the people involved. Universities get to hire researchers who would normally be out of their league. Superstar researchers get to work in the same city as their romantic partner. Grad students, postdocs and other young academics who have partners in academia (which is extremely common) get to imagine that they too will not have to choose between a career in academia and living in the same city as their partner. I also think this very convenience is one of the strongest arguments in favor of spousal hiring. The thing that sucks the most about the academic career path is not having much control over where you live, which makes it harder to maintain relationships, start a family and so on. Is doing something that makes that a little better really so bad?
However, I think that because spousal hiring is so convenient for so many people, it is often a bit controversial to question it (also since traditionally spousal hiring was seen as benefiting women, questioning it can be seen as vaguely sexist). To gain better intuition for the topic, I think it is interesting to consider some thought experiments.
As I said, I really don't have a firm opinion about whether spousal hiring is good or not (or under what circumstances) and I'm curious what all of you think.
Some scattered thoughts:
Partner hires pretty clearly evolved from the complexities of what is an insanely punishing market--but also partly, I think, just plain old-fashioned feminism.
Suppose you finish your undergraduate education quickly--let's even say you were double-promoted as a child, dual-enrolled your way to an Associate's degree at age 17, completed the rest of a five-year Master's program at age 20, and launched straight into your PhD. You get your first postdoc position at, let's say, 24 years old, but this requires you to move to a new community, perhaps a new country. Call it a three-year postdoc, during which you are consumed with applying for long-term positions all over the map; say this is when you get involved in a potentially long-term romantic relationship with a fellow academic in a similar position.
Now you are 27 years old (I don't know what the real median age is for people completing their first postdoc, but it's probably more like early to mid 30s). Statistically, you're lucky if one of you gets a long-term position, and the other is going to be an adjunct, or do a second postdoc, or something similarly menial. Here it's pretty common for couples to start having the "whoever gets the best job, the other one will follow" conversation--but unless the "best job" is in a place planted thick with colleges and universities (Boston, say), the "one who follows" is likely to be stepping out of academia, creating a career break that could very well become permanent.
If the "one who follows" is ready to settle down and raise some children in a single-income household (rule of thumb, the pay schedule for professors is commonly 10%-20% above what a kindergarten teacher in the same geographic area makes)--no problem! The timing is good (assuming you only want one or two kids--if you wanted more than that, you should have started before you finished your undergrad!) and life goes on. But of course the person who is traditionally expected to give up everything to raise children, at least for the first several years, is the mother. Many mothers are totally okay with this. But a feminist might observe that not engaging in partner hiring perpetuates patriarchal oppression and contributes to the particular subjugation of smart women.
Throwing the "one who follows" a low-salary, untenured teaching position may be an effective way to fill out the ranks of the underpaid teaching positions on which most universities rely to stay solvent; I doubt Yale has too much difficulty finding all the teachers it needs, but even large state universities are sometimes left scrambling for qualified instructors. At any institution smaller or less prestigious than that, you can bet they are in a somewhat perpetual staffing emergency. Not for tenured faculty, no! Everyone wants those jobs. But for qualified adjuncts, lecturers, and the like, absolutely. Partner hires thus also help alleviate the single-income-household problem, though it probably discourages actual childbearing less than one might suppose--I have never been part of a department where more than about 60% of the faculty had children, and my female colleagues generally have fewer children than my male colleagues. I have one co-worker right now who, when she joined us 5 years ago, had no children but planned on having one "in the next year or two." She recently turned 40 and mentioned that "the longer I go without having children, the less it appeals to me to do so."
People who are determined to succeed in academia are, in short, often faced with years of brief residence followed by dramatic relocation, and it only takes two or three such stints to put you past prime childbearing years--especially when you are female. This is true almost regardless of how precocious you are, or how efficiently you complete your studies.
So while I wouldn't personally advocate for a partner hire (because I am old fashioned enough to feel comfortable battling the two income trap by asking others to make costly defections from the status quo), I don't think there's any real harm in them. The colleagues I've had who did the long distance relationship thing so they and their partners could pursue separate academic careers have often been poor campus citizens, as they spend so much time traveling that their service contributions suffer. This is just one way in which partner hires can be made to the advantage of the university, and on balance they probably do not shut any competitors out of any highly desirable positions. Rare indeed is the university willing to hand out tenure on the basis of romantic entanglement!
I mostly agree with your explanation of how spousal hires came to be common and accepted, but I think feminism might play a somewhat smaller role than you ascribe to it. It had some influence, but in my opinion, its most important effect was simply increasing the number of couples where both partners are academics. As long as such couples are common, and as long as the academic job market works the way it does now, spousal hiring will be appealing.
Well, okay, but in the larger sense that partner hires would not be a thing at all if women were still overwhelmingly homebound, feminism is the single most important cultural factor responsible for all partner hires.
I think this is buying the propaganda a bit. Feminists would love if that were true, but I think it's a more complex story on how that happened.
I think this is both an interesting and very complicated topic. I have actually wondered before if the changing demands of the job market (i.e. a shift from physical labor to more desk jobs which it is easier for women to be competitive at) partially drove the growth of feminism (rather than feminism causing the job market to accept more women).
Not sure if the timing works out, there.
The textbook answer is that women entered the workforce thanks to the World Wars. That meant a lot of manufacturing, not just desk jobs. Our transition to a service economy really hadn’t taken off.
Women really started getting involved with factory work in the 1800s, which was definitely before the growth of desk jobs. In this era, they also started gaining access to higher education. I think that predates the main suffrage movements.
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