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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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