Dual-Career Academic Couples: What Universities Need to Know

One of the most important challenges facing universities in the twenty-first century is ensuring a high-quality faculty while allowing for flexibility and change to the traditional hiring and tenure systems. Central to this challenge is “meeting the needs and expectations of dual-career academic couples,” suggest the authors of a new survey, Dual-Career Academic Couples: What Universities Need to Know, conducted by the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University. The report summarizes findings from a survey of more than 9,000 full-time faculty members at thirteen leading U.S. research institutions. More faculty than ever before—36 percent of the academic workforce—are part of dual-academic couples, and a solid understanding the benefits and pitfalls of partner hiring cannot be overlooked by administrators, the authors write. “New hiring practices are needed to support a diverse professoriate—and one of these practices is couple hiring.”

FINDINGS

Partnering Patterns in Academia

• Women are more likely than men to have partners who are also academics (40 percent of women in the sample, verses 34 percent of men).
• Those with the highest rate of academic partners are men in the humanities (42 percent have academic partners) and women in the natural sciences (48 percent have academic partners).
• Faculty members from underrepresented minority groups are only slightly less likely to have an academic partner than faculty members from non-minority groups (31 percent verses 36 percent)

Career Paths and Priorities

• Academic couples of all ranks are most likely to report that “both careers are equal” when asked “In your relationship, whose career is considered primary?”
• Male full professors are more likely to report that “my career is primary” (63 percent) than male assistant or associate professors or female professors of any rank.
• Both men and women in dual-career academic partnerships are more likely than those with non-academic employed spouses to report that their professional mobility is hindered by their partnership (54 percent of academic-partner women and 41 percent of academic-partner men, verses 48 percent of non-academic partner women and 33 percent of non-academic-partner men).

University Practices and Faculty Perceptions

• The factor most cited as “very important” in making a job offer to a “partner hire” is the second hire’s quality of scholarship (57 percent). The desirability of the first hire (53 percent) and the university’s funds for a second hire (47 percent) are also cited as very important considerations.
• Seventy-one percent of survey respondents agree that partner hiring increases the proportion of women faculty; 49 percent agree that it increases the proportion of underrepresented minority faculty.
• While only 29 percent of respondents agree with the statement, “My department has hired partners I consider underqualified,” 44 percent agree that “couples working in the same department create conflicts of interest.”

The entire report may be downloaded in PDF format.

DID YOU KNOW?

• The most-cited reason women refused an academic job offer was because their academic partners were not offered suitable employment in the new location.
• Among survey respondents, the first hire raised the issue of a partner hire in most cases (69 percent). In only 18 percent of cases did the hiring committee bring up the issue.
• In all situations, men are more likely than women to consider their own career to be primary—50 percent among those with an academic partner, 71 percent for those with a non-academic employed partner, and 92 percent for those with a stay-at-home partner.