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Notes -
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.
You'll be shocked to hear then when two students meet and marry in med school (another common practice), they will try to keep them together or compatitble when assigning their internships and rotations.
I can't imagine a more sympathetic to human realities to this concept, and am really baffled by the person who would put 'liberal fairness' on such a pedestal that they would get remotely worked up at the idea of supporting marriages / families, the fundamental social unit of society.
The notion that we ought to support marriages/families as the fundamental social unit of society in favor over liberal fairness didn't really occur to me when I read this top post, but after reading this post and georgioz's below, I wonder if it'd be quite possible to hit both targets just by offering a spousal stipend. Instead of spending money filling a role with a compromise candidate who got bonus points due to nepotism, give the money to the spouse to just do whatever with. This would leave the spouse free to pursue homemaking or other marriage/family-related endeavors.
Of course, then the university still needs to find and pay someone (presumably more qualified) to fill the role the spouse would have filled. So the stipend could be less than what the salary would have been; in exchange, the spouse has no work obligations to the university, and so is free to get a part-time job if they need to make up for the difference compared to what a salary would've given them, while still giving them more time to spend on marriage/family-related endeavors. In terms of supporting marriage and family, having one spouse with substantial time not committed to full-time work so they can pursue this stuff seems quite a lot better than just having the couple working at the same place.
Do most PhD holding women married to professors want to be homemakers? While there’s surely professors with homemaker wives, it seems like part of the homemaker bargain is ‘not getting a PhD’, and that women with preexisting PhD’s are mostly not women who want to become homemakers.
I'd guess the vast majority of PhD holding women and men wouldn't want to be homemakers. But this kind of norm would nudge the marginal couple into having one of them being homemakers. This seems like it'd be beneficial if our goal is to support marriages and families, since shifting a couple from both full-time working to one full-time working and one homemaking helps that.
There's no way to tell, but I'd also wager that this is a stronger effect than the benefits to marriages and families that come from universities giving spouses nepotism jobs, because the effect on a couple's competence in raising kids seems far more impacted by whether one of the parents is devoting time to it than by whether both parents are working jobs at the same place that matches their passion and competence and whatever. There would be negative impacts to parents who are demoralized due to their personal disappointment in their own careers, as well as those who go the long-distance-marriage route with both partners pursuing academic jobs that match their competence in different places, but I'm skeptical that these would happen often enough and with enough severity to be greater than the marriage and family-supporting effect of nudging some marginal spouses to homemaking. There's certainly the possibility that these marginal spouses are so few that these downsides do outweigh them, of course.
Again, I don't see any way of knowing or finding out. At the least, we could also hit something closer to liberal fairness while doing this.
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Most of them, almost definitely. But on the margins, this could nudge people in this situation who are just on the border into pursuing homemaking instead of taking on a nepotism reward job. And if the idea is that we want to support marriages and families as much as we do liberal fairness, this kind of nudge seems like it would be helpful.
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Oh, so then let's make it a society wide practice - if you get a job in local Amazon warehouse you are entitled to have your spouse or close family member employed as well. Let's make it a law. Yeah, I don't think so.
Far from merely entitled, if you work at any local warehouse to me they offer incentives for you to bring in additional workers from your friends and family. Stopping just shy of letting you recruit your own regiment civil war style.
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You're entirely within your rights to demand that and if your market value is sufficient to command it then they will acquiesce. What's stopping you?
What is stopping me is overall morality and being judged by peers, sometimes even written ethical rules. But what amazes me is that simple renaming of a thing gets so far: it is not bad nepotism what we are doing, we are only doing "spousal hiring". Renaming things seems like a really powerful social technology of how to render written rules moot, and judging by reactions here it also works on people. Awesome.
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Yeah that's right. The only two options are to legally mandate or disallow it. quite.
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And that kind of nepotism is shockingly common in jobs that aren’t as strongly competed with as in academia.
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University professors married to each other are unlike warehouse workers. The warehouse worker's wife can presumably find a job in town. A professor's wife who is also a professor will work at the same university or leave academia.
So there's one norm for warehouse workers and a different one for professors.
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Yes, this is called good old fashioned nepotism. When this manager in the team fucked his subordinate and then promoted her, everybody knew about it and many thought it was kind of piece of shit move. It also did not endear the newly promoted person in eyes of many of her colleagues. It was tolerated as lesser evil for many reasons by his superiors unfortunately. Little did I know that what he should have done was telling it transparently by saying that he was not promoting somebody for fucking his brains out, it was just normal HR benefit of "sex partner hiring" he was awarded during standard salary increase negotiations, no big deal. You see, he is really working hard and he works harder with hard-on that he needs to be motivated, his situation is special because he has no time to look for partners as he is working so much. Reading apologetics here in this thread I'd guess he would probably have much more defenders, silly him.
This isn't a manager hiring someone he's fucking. It's an employer hiring the spouse of someone they're pursuing as part of a compensation package. I don't think he difference is particularly subtle.
It is almost exactly the same scenario. There are three people: hiring manager, then there is the superstar fucker and then there is candidate that is being fucked. Superstar is pressuring hiring manager to hire his mistress "or else"- he leaves along with grants on his research or whatever. I can even construct it a such: superstar researcher with millions in grants comes to the hiring office that he fucks this student and she may be leaving for a job in other city. If they do not hire his mistress as an adjunct then he is going with her along with grants because he loves her. Now the same happens with my example of corporate manager: he fucks this young intern and she tells him that she has a good job lined up in another city. Manager sees this as a threat so he pressures his colleague in other department to hire his mistress, he even gets tacit approval from his own superiors because he is now responsible for crucial project and nobody wants to rock the boat for such a silly thing. How exactly is this different: except the fact that university has this as a written policy?
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I don’t think the difference exists. Partly because the “spouse” appears to be just someone the candidate is fucking. Mostly because my objection is that one of the responsibilities of people in a hierarchy is to behave well to the people below them. That means giving applicants a fair shake and it means promoting people because of seniority, talent and experience, not because of who they’re having sex with.
Okay, I guess I'll spell it out for you. A manager promoting someone they are fucking (assuming it is not because they are the best candidate for the job) is presumably doing it as quid pro quo for the ass, to improve their own economic situation as they are sharing an income with the person they're fucking, and/or as a sign to future potential romantic partners that putting out pays out.
A manager negotiating a spousal hire as part of a compensation package is attempting to secure a business relationship that is in the best interest of the university and utilizing the various tools at their disposal to do so, including potentially that spousal hire. They aren't benefiting themselves except insofar as performing highly at their job (securing top talent) benefits them, which is precisely the purpose of their relationship with the university.
It not only isn't the same thing it is exactly the opposite.
You are literally describing the same situation. Manager/Superstar researcher is using his superstar influence in order to secure job for somebody he fucks is the same as saying:
Yeah, that is the point. Manager is negotiating with the company (hiring manager) to secure new business relationship (for his mistress and for himself to the extent of getting potentially a good fuck as a result) and it is in best interest of the company (or else he leaves in the middle of the most important project to competitor or whatever) and he is utilizing various tools at his disposal (e.g. a lunch with hiring manager and his manager etc.) to secure that relationship.
I understand corporatespeak, no need to remind me that "spousal hiring" and "best interest of the company" means "hire somebody I fuck" and "do as I say or else something bad happens". Nobody with IQ more than 80 falls for this shit.
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You are being utilitarian, I am being deontological. It doesn’t matter who benefits, it’s not a moral way to handle your employees.
To put it another way, there are many, many things that a manager can do which is in the best interests of their employer (corruption, assassination, faking emission tests) but being good business doesn’t make those actions morally acceptable.
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It is possible for things to be a reasonable idea in some circumstances without it making sense to make it mandatory in all vaguely similar situations. It is also possible to conceive of a society where the hiring unit is the family (whether nuclear or extended) rather than the individual, but that is not the society we live in.
It makes far more sense in an Amazon warehouse, where what’s needed is a functional human body, than in academia, which is highly prestigious and where your output depends heavily on your specific background, interests and talent. The difference is that a sufficiently powerful academic can push the university into taking their significant other instead of a more deserving candidate.
This, or the living wage, works for me. As you say, the difficulty is getting there.
This is why it doesn't make sense for Amazon. In the university case, the university is choosing on the one hand between a superstar for a prestigious position and a somewhat-worse candidate for a lesser position (or even a useless sinecure), and on the other hand between a much inferior candidate for the prestigious candidate and the best candidate (or nobody) for the lesser position. In the Amazon case, Amazon is choosing between essentially interchangeable candidates for the primary position; there's no incentive for them to hire a spouse.
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How involved are you in academia? It’s incredibly competitive - depends on the field but usually only a tiny fraction of postgraduate students move on to being full-time paid academics. And getting a position because of who you’re sleeping with is the dictionary definition of nepotism. At least if they limited it to marriage or shared children there would be a higher bar to climb. I sympathise with the aims of the system but even so I’m surprised people aren’t livid - I’d never heard of this system before.
For doctors it makes more sense to me. I’m not one so maybe I’m missing subtleties but within bars like rural / urban / deprived I would have thought that doctors and positions were pretty much interchangeable so it doesn’t seem unfair.
It's not the same, sure, but where you get residency can be very career defining, especially if you have ambitions at being something other than being a shopping center dermatologist.
I have medium experience wtih academia.
I sympathise with the aims of the system but even so I’m surprised people aren’t livid - I’d never heard of this system before.
Sure No disagreement there.
So why is everyone in this subthread ignoring that there's an easy way to guarantee this that could almost never harm meritocracy at all?
It's simple: Women don't work. Women are never in academia. (The distribution of high IQ men vs. high IQ women, particularly in STEM subjects, proves that this won't cause much if any disruption to the technological and intellectual progress of society.) Women follow their men, who make enough to support their entire families by default.
Thus, any occupation is free to pick the best man for the job at any time, with the man secure in the knowledge that his wife can be firmly supported in her natural, biologically ordained role as his homemaker, mother of his children, and supporter.
And how do you propose to ensure that a woman can leave an abusive husband while still keeping herself fed and housed?
If a competent council of men determines that another man's treatment of his wife is really beyond conscionability, then custody of her could fall back to her previous steward (most likely her father). If he or any other reasonable steward (uncle, brother, etc.) is unavailable, then the state would take responsibility. Such cases would be uncommon and unlikely, as only extremes could justify severing a man's feminine property interests.
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Wouldn't a lot of high IQ men have to shift into less intellectually loaded but still necessary work? It's just the law of comparative advantage, more menial but unavoidable jobs being done by a bigger labour force frees up time for the cutting edge stuff.
That seems unlikely to me. How many women do blue collar "less intellectually loaded but still necessary work"? How many women are garbage collectors, miners, plumbers, etc.?
It seems to me like a significant portion of the jobs women do are either "make work" or a consequence of their own presence in the workforce and would significantly disappear without them in it. For example, without women to make discrimination claims about "sexism" or otherwise cause drama, you'll need a lot less staff in HR, DEI, and so on... who conveniently enough mostly tend to be women themselves.
(To be clear maybe my initial proclamation was a bit too broad and we can still have feminine nurses, babysitters, hairdressers, etc., leaving a few occupations open to them (though strictly under the supervision, guidance, and control of their husband and thus ideally operated on a small scale from their houses). Nothing too important though, not that this would change much from present circumstances in the vast majority of cases other than an end to counterproductive, socially destructive LARPing.)
It reminds me of how so many companies rushed to replace their indigenous programming workforce with third-worlders from countries like India for example. It seems like a great deal superficially. You get ten guys for the price of one!... until you realize that your new ten guys are only capable of producing Stack Overflow salad and aren't even a 100th as productive as the original guy.
Adding women to the workforce seems like a similar "deal" to me. You get twice as many workers! That really oughta boost your economy, right? Except due to the basic nature of IQ distribution by gender they overwhelmingly won't be high IQ enough to make big impacts where it matters, and overwhelmingly due to their natural predispositions they will simply refuse to do the hard manual labor that has generally been how those lesser in IQ have earned their keep. What's left? HR ladies, twerking on OnlyFans, LARPing in office jobs flirting with men to get them to do their work for them (obviously not all women do this, but it's almost certainly a heck of a lot more common than the reverse which is probably mostly non-existent), the occasional nice but expendable dental hygienist, and so on. (Women working also increases consumption, which women naturally do far more of than men, which requires more production but quite arguably mostly of the generally wasteful and frivolous sort. Imagine all of the resources we could free up without women with the disposable income to buy their 50th "Live, Laugh, Love"-esque sign. My point is that while women generate economic activity, a lot of what they generate is completely irrelevant without them.)
It's obvious that the deal is phony, because it's obvious that in basically almost any area of the economy affected by women there has hardly been a doubling of real, tangible value since women started entering the workforce. (Almost all of the additional economic value/productivity since then has been generated by information technology which was almost exclusively invented/developed by and is almost exclusively maintained by men.) Rather, the most important long-term capital of society, things like social bonds, healthy gender relations, families, and romantic partnerships/romantic relationship formation, the people, is pretty obviously worse off in most ways than ever before at least partially because of women's "liberation". The fact that anybody even has to discuss whether it's a good idea to hire women to pretend to be as smart as their husbands (or "sexist" to oppose it) just to secure the use of those husbands' intellectual gifts is proof of that. Only largely fake numbers are occasionally doing well, and even they're having trouble nowadays being massaged enough to avoid showing the true underlying cracks in society.
This isn't even getting into how much more productive high IQ men will be without modern adversarial gender relations weighing them down. With men being guaranteed secure domestic lives without having to fight for them in the Kafkaesque rumble pit of modern dating, their productivity will shoot up, and the productivity gains from the men who will be motivated to reenter the workforce (current NEETs, hikkis, "no pussy no work" guys, etc.) will likely eclipse all of the productivity that any amount of women ever added to the economy. (One high IQ man abstaining from present society due to his disgust with it could come up with a new invention or idea that could create more value for society than 500 million working women. And how many high IQ men from the past who revolutionized society or matters of the intellect otherwise would have their productivity vastly diminished by modern feminized/gynosupremacist society (were they made to live in it instead)? Would a "creepy incel chud" like Newton be able to readily innovate today as effectively as he did in his own time? Something to think about.)
Addressing this specific part of the post: I think that your model of the motivations of scientific thinkers is off. The way I see it is that this sort of person, throughout history, is motivated by a combination of non-sexual social status (e.g. the desire to just friggin’ win that manifested itself in the mathematical duels surrounding the discovery of the solution to cubic equations) combined with an intrinsic curiosity to know things and solve hard problems. You could say that the former corresponds to the urge to prove people wrong on the Internet or accrue fancy academic titles, and the latter corresponds to a propensity to get nerd-sniped.
Even if scientist-types would appreciate scoring some poon as a side-effect of their labor, I imagine that very few have the willpower to push back against those very strong urges in order to protest any gynocentric society. N=1 here, and I’m no Newton to be sure, but even if I find it unfair that my tax dollars are going to fund a single mother’s hedonistic lifestyle or whatever, I simply cannot fathom pulling myself away from my research in protest. I would bet that high-IQ scientists feel similarly.
Conversely, if a NEET who watches anime adaptations of Kirara CGDCT manga all day were the kind of person who would be making huge scientific advancements if he just had himself a wife, then he’d probably already be making those advancements. (In fact, some of those NEETs are, although Haruhi isn’t CGDCT.)
ETA: Where you might have a point is in the case of NEETs who spend a full-time job’s worth of time writing SNES emulators or making furry VR games or what have you, who would instead, if they had a family to rear and mouths to feed, be forced to engage in more productive endeavors (if helping Google write better spyware is considered productive). But this strikes me as not a situation in which the NEETs consciously decide to opt-out of society to protest gynocentrism. I’m inclined to think that the autistic furry group is largely disjoint from the /r9k/ group (for example, the former group is more likely to be gay or asexual).
Maybe "abstaining" is the wrong term, as it implies an entirely conscious endeavor. But being high IQ doesn't make you immune to social contagion. The intellectual achievements of the 20th century Soviet Union (which did admittedly exist in some cases) vs. 20th century China vs. the 20th century US prove that. You simply can't achieve as much in a fucked up society.
I think The Haruhi Problem proves my point. Sure, as you said, those with an innate intellectual curiosity can't have it entirely turned off, as the anonymous individual behind that proof demonstrates. But because of the present state of society, instead of working in a proper math department with his intellectual peers and delivering the value that he could have provided them and vice-versa, he ended up posting this reasonably significant mathematical advancement in response to a gag post on 4chan. (Sure there's a chance that he's an actual academic who posed and answered the question himself, thinking it would be funnier that way, but I doubt it. Very few people would sacrifice a genuine shot at career advancement and clout just to create some humorous Internet lore.)
How much more could this mind achieve or have achieved if not pushed to the fringes of society? (Keep in mind, his correct solution to the problem was posted in 2011 and widely acknowledged as correct not too long after that. It then took until 2019 for it to be published academically in a manner that allowed it to be formally acknowledged as a part of "the literature".)
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What can I say? I watched friends half-destroy themselves trying to get an academic position. If they were missing out because they didn’t pick the right person to have sex with, then yes, I mind. There are enough unfairnesses in academic hiring without adding more.
It depends on the details. If these spouses are good enough to get the position on their own merits but things are smoothed a little to make sure that the right position opens at the right time, that’s okay. If the positions are clearly non-competitive salaried dead ends, that’s also okay. Though not very effective, I imagine.
I’m VERY pro-family, and it may be that no better solution can be found while two-wage families remain standard, but I don’t have to like it.
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