[Another draft-pile post from this summer when it felt like I couldn’t finish anything I started. —fl]
Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Professors highlights a study on the hazards of “marrying up” that she got from Historiann
...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.
Towards the end of the theme song for the 1965 American TV comedy “Green Acres“ the husband who wishes to move to the country sings “You are my wife…” and his partner warbles with resignation “Goodbye city life…”
The lines went largely unremarked because at the time it was a foregone conclusion that, even if the woman worked, a husband’s career opportunities pretty much determined where the couple was going to go.
From conversations with academic couples there’s also evidently an institutional two-for-one tradition where it’s assumed that if you hire one candidate on a tenure track his or (less frequently, evidently, at least for now) her partner will be over a barrel anyway so why “waste” another tenure position on them? Unless it’s a town with a lot of colleges if the spouse want to work in their field at all they’ll settle for non-tenure contracts.
I’m not so confident the twofer tradition will disappear — if the rise in divorce in the last 40 years hasn’t changed that probably nothing will. But with colleges now graduating quite a few more women than men there’s some better than zero chance that the unfairness treatment will at least become more gender neutral.
Another reason, by the way, why the equality of opportunity (look, now there’ve been two women vice-presidental candidates on losing party tickets!) isn’t always the best metric of success. (Fortunately it’s also not the only such metric.)
Submitted by 2407 (not verified) on Tue, 2008-09-23 20:33.
Oh figleaf - I should be preparing for classes, but you know how to bait me, don't you?
Pretty much from its inception, our women's and gender studies program has lived from the adjunct labor of captive "trailing spouses." The irony of this hasn't escaped us.
I teach at the only college in town. The town in question is in a fairly remote rural area. The other large local employer is Wal-Mart. I love my students; I love my colleagues.
The "twofer" system is so crazy, I was grateful to have my little adjunct job even though in real terms I earned less at it than I did years earlier as a grad student teaching assistant. I have a Ph.D. from a fancy-pants place, yet I had no access to group health insurance and earned less than many people working at Wal-Mart. I've now got a better gig as a visiting professor but it's still insecure. Again, I'm sincerely grateful to have it - that's how skewed this market is, and how strong the assumption that I'm privileged to be able to pursue what many people apparently regard as a cushy hobby.
Universities may be the most hypocritical institutions in America when it comes to the gap between liberal principles and regressive practices. (See also: maternity leave. Historiann has covered that recently, too.) Here, this gap has been bad enough that it took appointment of a male Mormon dean to improve the position of the WGS program.
I'm pretty cynical about real gender equity on the "twofer" issue in the next 20 years. I know a few men in comparably exploitative positions, but I know more of them who've had access to steady research positions, at a minimum, when their female partner got the tenure-track job. On the other hand, there are so many unemployed and underemployed female academics in this town that at one point we were semi-seriously threatening to found an alternative institution, the University of Trailing Spouses. ("Trailing spouse" is itself a pretty vile term if you deconstruct it, but I'm too tired from teaching to bother!)
The flip side of this issue is that many of the men I know from grad school days have managed to "have it all" - a tenure-track job plus a partner and kids. Of the women, some of us have tenure-track jobs, some have children, and while these aren't entirely disjoint sets, far fewer of us have managed to combine both.