Academic

Romantic Partners and Academics

By Ann Bartow

Historiann has an interesting post entitled: ?Marrying up,? and why that could screw up your career in which she notes:

There?s a new report out on the careers of social scientists, via Inside Higher Ed. The University of Washington Center for Innovation and Research in Graduate Education has published a report based on survey data from people trained in anthropology, communication, geography, history, political science and sociology.  (See the full report here.  Oddly, for the purposes of this report, history is a ?social science,? but economics is not.  Wev.  I wonder if econ would have skewed the data because it is still hugely male dominated?)

And she considers the findings, which she asserts support a conclusion that ” Women, much more often than men, are in marriages that don?t privilege their career tracks.” Men?s and women?s academic careers start off relatively equally, but 6 to 10 years out, men are more likely to have tenure or jobs outside of academe (generally with higher salaries than those for professors) and women are more likely to have jobs off the tenure track.

Meanwhile over at The Faculty Lounge, Laura Applemen observes:

A new study by Stanford’s Institute for Gender Research has found that 36% of professors at “leading universities” have partners who are also professors, and the proportion of faculty members who are hired as couples is on the rise. The report can be found here.

Interestingly,  this study, which looked at 13 top research institutions, discovered that 40% of women have academic partners, and that dual hiring rates are higher among women (13%) than men (7%).   The study concluded that “couple hiring becomes a particularly relevant strategy for the recruitment and retention of female faculty.”

Are the women who partner with other academics “marrying up,” and will that hurt their careers? Sounds like still another study is needed!

–Ann Bartow

Full post as published by Feminist Law Professors on August 22, 2008 (boomark / email).