Department of Science and Technology Studies

A Report on Spousal Hiring Policies in Academe 

Introduction

The following is a brief summary of the results of my research into spousal hiring policies at other institutions. The information is drawn primarily from two web-sites created by people who have previously researched this material.  Some data mining in various search engines for keywords and institutions mentioned in the studies was also required.  A few of the sources were picked up by word of mouth. This report is not comprehensive, since I chose to draw the line upon reaching the stage of more than enough. The material included in this package is meant to present a broad range of approaches and views on the subject.

The format of this report is informal, being mostly a structured list, with commentary, of issues related to spousal hiring. The intent is to provide a reasonable synopsis of the critical points in the material without getting lost in the narrative. The main body of this report is divided into three parts:

Locations from which this information is taken are can be reached through the appendices, which are links to source materials.  A resource folder with a hard copy of those documents referenced in the appendices has also been created.
 

Clearinghouse Site 1 --
Dual Career Science Couples
Marc Sher & Laurie E. McNeil

In 1998, Laurie McNeil and Marc Sher conducted a web-based survey on the problem of dual-career science couples finding employment in the same geographic region as one another. The information is almost purely anecdotal, but is comprehensive and informed enough to be valuable. Although the focus is on science couples, and in particular physicists, most of the respondents are members of the academic community, and the results do generalize to other disciplines within academe. The problem, as they perceive it, is summarized as follows:

The fact that the density of available jobs for physicists is low in most places at any particular time means that the challenge of the dual job search can have a significant effect on a physicist's career. The two-body problem also poses a challenge for institutions that hire physicists, as it is increasingly likely that the top candidate in a search will have a spouse who is also seeking professional employment. Lack of suitable employment for the spouse can lead the candidate to reject a job offer, or to leave the job after a few years if the spouse can find a better situation elsewhere. The frustration of unemployment can also cause some to leave physics altogether, representing a net loss to the profession. As these employment problems are more acute for women, lack of attention to dual-career issues can hamper efforts to increase the representation of qualified women in physics.

A report by a review committee at University of California - Santa Cruz puts it more firmly:

Nothing is more important to the achievement of an organization's goals than the acquisition and retention of talented, productive people.

Organizations are increasingly competing to acquire and retain talented individuals for whom the spouse's employment is a major factor when career decisions are made.

Over 80 percent of the recently hired employees in these companies said they would want employment assistance for their spouse before they would make another move.

Also included in this package is a report by Lisa E. Wolf-Wendel, Susan Twombly and Suzanne Rice entitled Dual Career Couples: How Institutions of Higher Education are Keeping them Together. They starts with an excellent summary of the current extent of the literature on the subject and then segue nicely into their own survey. Being a summary, it is hard to summarize, but it is worth reading. Their survey statistics are also informative, although I'd have to brush up on my own statistics to give you a full accounting of what they mean.

They do point out that employment issues for dual-career couples in the academic setting is a woefully under-explored topic, so if anyone is looking for something to do ... They also point out that the primary reason cited for helping dual career couples was that "doing so is perceived as important to achieving recruitment and retention goals." Few other reasons were cited, although arguments that such a policy supported family values did occasionally come up.

Another useful topic they address is institutional responses to the development of spousal hiring policies. It should be noted that while McNeil and Sher's report was based on a survey of science faculty, Wolf-Wendel et al. surveyed administrators. Therefore they provide different perspectives on the issues at hand.

The McNeil and Sher report will form the backbone of this paper since it nicely summarizes the material. Therefore, I will not discuss it in detail here. Most of the relevant links listed on their website are included in the supplemental materials herein. Much of the material they have links to discusses problems of gender inequality affecting dual-career couples within the same academic field. A book they recommend as must reading is Academic Couples: Problems and Promises, edited by Ferber and Loeb. It might be worthwhile reading for someone at some later date, as any policy developed gets tweaked and refined.
 

Clearinghouse Site 2 --
Eric L. N. Jensen's Resources for Academic Couples

This is a listing of how different colleges and universities deal with two-career couples. Much of the relevant material has been included within. His links connect primarily to institutions with some form of spousal accommodation policy. The resources he provides links to will be discussed in the context of relevant topics.
 

A Final Introductory Note

It should be noted that there is little coordinated information on this topic, in spite of articles in various journals dedicated to educational issues. In e-mailing some of the people trying to put this information together, especially in terms of links on their sites that went nowhere, the response I received was in the range of "what you see is what we've got ... let us know what you find out." On the other hand, there is a great deal of uncoordinated and anecdotal information out there on the topic. Even the report created by Wolf-Wendal et al. was focused on the questionnaire approach, giving generalized context and statistical measurements rather than accumulating information on specific policies, their successes, and their failures. Also, both clearinghouse sites I found were directed more at dual career couples than at administrators attempting to set policy. This is a deficiency in the data, but that is what there is to work with.
 

Copyright 1999 -- Peter L. Kantor