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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.
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.
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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