Ah, the two-body problem. On NPR’s Marketplace last week, Kai Ryssdal had a piece entitled “Studying ways to help 2-career couples”, covering a “Dual Careers Conference” at Cornell. The audio is here, along with a transcript.
It’s an important issue, (which I’m not going to spend a huge amount of time on here, since I’ve been blogging too much this morning so far), and I’d no idea that there were conferences devoted to it.
From the point of view of academia, there’s one aspect of it which still has not penetrated very far in the minds of many, in my mind. It is one I tried to emphasize when this issue came up during various advisory committees I’ve served on with relevance to matters of hiring, diversity, etc. What’s on my mind is that the two-body problem (as it is jokingly referred to by some) is not always to be thought of as a “problem” from the point of view of potential employers. In fact, if you can work with a potential employee to find employment for their spouse at your or a neighbouring institution, it actually can strengthen your faculty roster in many ways. Aside from the obvious ones, there are the benefits of having happier employees who are committed to setting down roots, rather than an employee who is spending a lot of time travelling to or calling their spouse in another city, wondering every day whether their job is really worth that strain. Retention is a huge issue in managing your faculty. The value of settled employees cannot be overstated if you take the long view for your organization.
Anyway, have a listen to the article (or read the transcript). There’s the usual interview with members of couples who are academics and struggling with the issue, and it’s interesting if you’re not familiar with the matter, or perhaps if you’re in academia, early in your career and wondering about what the job market holds for you. And if you’re currently wondering whether to date other academics or not, don’t be put off (at least not by this issue!). Things are getting better. Employers are getting smarter about this, and more involved (see below), for a variety of reasons. In fact, Female Science Professor is unhappy with the bleak picture the article paints, and actually I agree. There are many fantastic success stories that could have been mentioned as well, with a bit of discussion of how fulfilling it can be to have solved the two-body problem. Having been through it myself as part of a two-body system for many years, and having solved it rather well (although we later decoupled, for unrelated reasons), I’d say that it is a battle worth fighting.
The thing I learned from the article is that there exists organizations called Higher Education Recruitment Consortiums (-ia?), or HERCs:
Universities in several regions throughout the country have developed HERCs: Higher Education Recruitment Consortiums.
There are HERCs in Northern California, Southern California, New Jersey, New England, New York and others are starting up. They’re basically clearing houses for all available jobs at all participating schools in a region.
HERC members hope that by collaborating, they’ll be able to hire their top-tier candidates by luring them to the region, rather than placing the burden on only one institution. But this means that at the New England HERC, for example, Harvard and MIT are sharing information about positions. That kind of open exchange doesn’t usually happen between schools who are more used to competing for professors.
Nancy Aebersold helped create the very first HERC in Northern California in 2000. She says that was an initial concern.
Nancy Aebersold: But it was pretty quickly put to rest. Overall, there was a sense that there’s enough talent out there and we actually thought that by collaborating, we would create a competitive advantage — for our area and for all the members of the HERC.
This is excellent. I found the Southern California one here, for example. Google for others. They were first set up in 2000, apparently. I must say that I had no idea they existed until I heard this piece, and I’m pretty sure that many others don’t know of them either. So look into the local HERC in your region (if you’re an employer, or member of a faculty and care about attracting quality colleagues in the future), and mention them to your potential employers when you’re at that stage of discussing the many broader issues that have an impact on your offer.
Also… Good Luck!
-cvj
Sounds like we are in agreement over the training provided then….! In fact, not “Quite the contrary”. Excellent!
My suspicion is that this is much more of a function of the graduate school you went to (hardly surprisingly, given the institution, at least as it was at the time) and less of the general feeling across the board. I would not say that students who are not on the professor track (or leave it for whatever reason) are stigmatized in general. That’s a very strong and unrepresentative word to use, I’d say… but I will be interested to hear from any current students reading who might be interested in speaking up… (and correlate their experience with their institution, if possible).
(I’ll be coming to find you for patent advice as soon as I’ve done with the prototypes in the basement, by the way…)
Cheers,
-cvj
I haven’t seen tons of articles about how bad it is to be an academic, so perhaps one of the differences in our POVs is the amount we think about issue — one could see the HERCs as a great improvement, one could see them as stepping in too late.
No, of course I didn’t opt out of academia solely for the two-body problem based on the anecdotes of others. I’m slightly smarter than that. It’s true that part of it was being an impressionable 23 year old seeing my advisor deal with the effects of the divorce of her out-of-state academic husband. Another part was not wanting to be an academic enough to go through the years of post-docs and grant-writing make the fabulous tenured professor job happen. I also realized that the part I liked best about science, doing experiments, would quickly be delegated to my grad students, and I’d move into grant-writing and administration before long. The overwhelming factor was not having the attention span to spend the rest of my career in one research field — I much preferred undergrad, where I had a larger breadth of fields to study, but in less depth.
You said (but I don’t know how to do those cute quotes): “The good news is that you end up as a smart person with great training…. even if you do not see the immediate relevance of the training. I’m pretty sure that is the case for you now.” — Quite the contrary — I first learned about patent law in my research lab — it’s not a departure form science by any means. A PhD is just about a prerequisite to do pharmaceutical and biotech patent law. As a patent attorney, I get to learn about cutting edge research in a variety of fields, from monoclonal antibodies to small molecules to oxidative hair dyes to medical devices … It’s like being an undergrad again! This fall my practice will shift to doing start-up work, helping turn basic academic research into businesses that will eventually bring/get therapeutics to market, and patients.
While I haven’t been monitoring the two-body problem, I have been monitoring the so-called alternative careers for scientists. There are great careers for us in law and business, where our scientific training is essential. But I wish students who opted out of or couldn’t develop academic research careers weren’t stigmatized in grad school. (Perhaps this has changed since I left.)
I do agree with you that the longer time between graduate work and getting a position does disproportionately affect women… but the answer is to better maintain and improve the support structures for women in such careers (and make them aware of them – and the existing success stories) rather than just paint a bleak and further discouraging picture. People within the system are working on these things…The conference reported on in the post is but one of several efforts. Many universities (my own included) are working hard on support structures individually, and the last part of the post mentions collaborative efforts between universities too.
It would be nice to hear a lot more about these efforts, and their results, and have stories out there about them for young people to hear about too.
Cheers,
-cvj
This is unfortunate, but I don’t see how confusing the message helps here. If people are not doing a good job about explaining clearly that it is tough to get a job in academia – and if young people going into the field are not listening carefully enough – (it is definitely a mixture of the two), that is one thing…and we should address that. However, the solution to having a number of people disappointed at having to find a job “out there” as opposed to having that academic position they’d hoped for is not to paint an overly bleak picture about the life at every opportunity. It is not a good idea to drive people away from the field and even doing the training in the first place. If there are more and more articles piled on top of each other about how terrible it is to follow an academic career, we’ll very quickly end up with many talented people not even bothering to do a phd. And doing a phd does not mean that you are necessarily on track to be (or even interested in being) a professor. If somebody told you that back when you were choosing career paths, they were telling you utter nonsense.
What is needed is more work showing the complexities of the career, the challenges involved (let’s not forget that any career choice has challenges, and to that there is never enough room for everyone at the top of any career structure) along with the rewards of persevering when and if (yes, there is luck involved often) one can.
So in summary (going back to where we came in) I think that it is of dubious value to the analysis to speculate on how much worse the spousal hire situation might be by taking into account people who left early on (for whatever reason) and so did not even come close to having to face that challenge (and may well have not even ended up choosing academic partners…). It is just too easy to pour lots of murky doom and gloom where there’s enough quite clear and well-lit doom and gloom already. Yes, there are problems. On the other hand, it’s a great career choice. And even if you do not ultimately go off and be a professor, the training and the life leading up to it is of high value, I would say. I had not realized that you chose not to continue after your phd because of your perception (based on anecdotes, according to what you say, and not first hand experience) about the job market without even trying it yourself. I’d say that nobody should just sit back and assume things are not going to work out for them because of what they heard happened to others. If you really want it enough, give it a shot… pretty much everybody relies on a bit of luck… you never know what might work out for you, that might not have worked at any other time.
The good news is that you end up as a smart person with great training…. even if you do not see the immediate relevance of the training. I’m pretty sure that is the case for you now. You’ve made a career change, but the fact that you did a phd is going to be (and has been, I bet) of great value to you down the line.
Among the most interesting Lawyers and MBA-trained people I’ve ever met were those who were following other careers first, and did not even know they were going to end up as Lawyers and MBAs. They’re not regretting the time they did phds (or whatever)… they loved that they did that for a while…. This also makes the pool of lawyers and people in business much stronger and broader, I’d say.
I think that this serendipitous aspect of the career structure is underplayed, and all you hear is the story that there are all these embittered people being driven out of science careers because nobody told them that there were not enough professor jobs. In fact, the story is much more interesting than that, and deserves to be told more carefully.
-cvj
Oh wait, one scientist friend is a full-time SAHM, but teaches university courses part-time.
I agree that articles that paint a bleak picture can be discouraging; on the other hand, it seems that few potential grad students understand that there aren’t enough academic positions for everyone. When I started grad school, I expected a two-year post-doc would be required. By the time I left, it seems that two three- to four-year post-docs were required. Some of the difference may have been my move form organic chemistry to biochemistry, but whatever the reason, looking at the changing conditions in the academic job market made it less and less attractive.
While not gender-specific, I think this move towards longer and longer post-docs disproportionately affects women. Although the women scientists and engineers at my school were only 20%, they make up 100% of the scientists I know who opted out of academic or scientific careers for their existing SOs or for the pre-tenure transient lifestyle. (Of course that’s not a scientific study, but a theoretical physicist I know once told me that one real data point can be enough to draw a conclusion.)
Including women (and men, it’s true) who opt out of academic careers would be helpful to diagnose the “two-body problem.” If we hope to have more women academics, we need to retain them before they see a bleak picture and opt out on their own. Academics see it as normal to move every 2-4 years for a decade and live apart from one’s spouse for extended periods of time. Most people (and many who opt-out) do not.
When I was a grad student and saw the heroics that friends went through to get post-docs and junior faculty positions, I wasn’t arrogant enough to think it would be different for me and I’d land a job at the perfect prestigious university in a desirable location. So, I choose another career path, where I could get a job in any city. And, good thing, because as it turns out, I’ve been able to follow my quasi-academic spouse for two moves. (Never fear, he has followed me too.) And I agree that each time it’s been easier to get a position in the new place for the trailing spouse because the other spouse also had reason to be there.
Naturally, the problem of career options for dual-degreed women isn’t limited to science. Real data show that five years our of my law school (a “top 5”), only 50% of the women lawyers will work at all five years after graduation. Interestingly, no female former scientists I know are SAHMs. I find it interesting to hypothesize about this…
Please don’t misunderstand: I do agree that the numbers are probably undercounted overall….. My worry about writing articles that paint a very bleak picture is that it further discourages people from giving the career a try. Just adds to the burden of (sometimes only apparent) obstacles that we all face in making academic careers.
-cvj
Hi,
I don’t think that is at all clear just to what extent the problem is worse because of attrition. Without knowing why those women (and men, actually – spouses come in both genders) opted out, we cannot tell if they would have faced that problem or not – not all academics choose academic partners (although apparently a lot do). So I would say that the problem (as it relates to the two-body issue) can only be accurately assessed on the strength of who is facing the problem, and not on who might have gone on to face the problem.
Cheers,
-cvj
I think the problem is worse than the article makes it seem. The article and HERCs discussion is underinclusive because of the vast numbers of women who opt out before they get anywhere near the academic job market.
Thanks David!
-cvj
There was a commentary on this topic in December in Symmetry magazine called “The two-body opportunity” that might be of interest as well.