My husband and I are eerily similar. We met in college, we majored in the same field (economics), we went to the same Ph.D. program, we studied with the same adviser, and we both wanted teaching jobs in academe.
I graduated two years ago, a year before my husband. Our son was born three months before I defended my dissertation. In between coping with early motherhood and complying with page-margin standards for my thesis, I hurriedly sent out applications for any visiting faculty position within a three-hour drive of our alma mater. I was extremely lucky to obtain a job at a prestigious liberal-arts college nearby.
The plan was that we would relocate our family to my new visiting job, my husband would commute to our alma mater (a two-hour drive), and we would go on the faculty job market together the following year, once he was ready. Our goal — which turned out to be a fantasy — was to find two tenure-track positions within a four-hour drive of each other, and live somewhere in the middle.
Academic hiring in economics is a streamlined and centralized process. When it was time to go on the tenure-track market, we each applied to more than 150 departments all around the world — which is the norm. Like other job candidates, we were told upfront that it was a bad idea to have geographical preferences, and we took that very seriously.
Mostly, we applied for positions separately and tracked our applications in individual Excel spreadsheets. My husband merged our spreadsheets and created a “map of possibilities” — with scattered red dots (where he applied) overlaid with blue dots (where I applied). When I was awake at 3 a.m. — worried about what would happen to us next year — I would look at the map of possibilities and try to convince myself that the chances were good that we’d land on a nice purple dot. Look at all these great cities, I told myself. London would be nice.
As the hiring process went on, it became clear that we would not be able to get jobs in the same city. That may not seem like a surprise, but it was still a major disappointment to us. Out of the hundreds of applications that we sent out, we revealed in only three of them that we had a two-body problem. We did that for those three institutions because they had very strong proclamations on their websites about dual-career and family-friendly policies. We never heard from any of them.
In any case, at the end of the process, we were faced with the following problem: We had both received tenure-track offers — but they were nowhere near each other.
Our initial determination to keep our family together began to wane once we were faced with the very real prospect of one of us being unemployed or underemployed for a year while following the other to their tenure-track position.
My husband and I have always been incredibly supportive of each other in our professional lives. Throughout the job search, he repeatedly told me that he would never stand in the way of my career, and I felt the same. I did not have it in me to tell my brilliant husband — who had worked so hard to get one of these highly coveted tenure-track positions — that he shouldn’t take it because of me.
We finally decided that, in the interest of both of our careers, we would accept the tenure-track positions. Our toddler and I would stay in Indiana where my job was, and my husband would commute back and forth from California. My husband suggested being the one who stayed with our son while I flew back and forth, but I never considered that because I could not imagine being without the baby. Both my sister and my best friend told me that our son would never remember this period in his life, and that he would not suffer psychologically in any way. I chose to believe them.
So that was how our crazy year began. My husband would return every two weeks for a long weekend. I found a good day-care center for my son and hired a wonderful babysitter who came for a couple of hours every weekend to relieve me. My in-laws also occasionally came to help, which was very nice, but I still felt very much alone. My parents live in Malaysia, so I could not rely on them for help. This was not how I had envisioned raising a child.
During this past year, I did not sleep very well because I always felt like I had to be on alert. I was constantly planning our meals because I was worried about having to drag a cranky toddler to the grocery store in the evenings. I made sure I was always fully stocked on Tylenol and Pedialyte, because how would I take a sick child to the pharmacy if I needed anything? I checked to make sure all of our windows and doors were locked multiple times every night before going to bed. My phone was almost always fully charged because I wanted to able to call for help as soon as I could if anything went terribly wrong. I brought my phone everywhere with me — even to class — because I needed to know if the day-care center called with an emergency.
It was a very stressful existence, and one that made me wholeheartedly appreciate all the single parents of the world. There were a countless number of times when I thought to myself, “This is not worth it. Why are we doing this?” I still don’t have a great answer — aside from it being the right decision for our careers, which, in retrospect, seems a bit silly.
As you can imagine, this past year was tough on our marriage and family. I became very frustrated with my husband for the pettiest of things, mostly out of resentment of being left alone with our child. My husband fell into the routine of constantly apologizing for every single thing because of the guilt of living away from his family. Our son threw a more-than-average amount of tantrums, most of which coincided with the day his father had to go back to work.
During the time we spent apart, we both tried asking our respective institutions about a spousal accommodation. However, we were frustrated to learn that it was not something most departments offered. At my institution, a lecturer position opened up, but it came with a 4-4 teaching load and we were convinced that my husband would not be able to keep up his active research agenda if he accepted such a teaching-intensive position.
After searching for a while, we finally found an institution — in Malaysia — that was willing to hire both of us. It’s a newly created business school affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Given the opportunity to be together and to spend time with my family, we accepted the offers and quit our jobs for a new adventure. We are in the process of relocating our family (which includes two cats) to the other side of the world. Since I am Malaysian, this undertaking is not as overwhelming to us as it would be for most other couples, but it’s still very challenging.
Education is often touted as a door to more career opportunities, but the irony in being very highly specialized is that it makes it harder for you to get jobs that you’re trained for because there just aren’t that many available.
Our story is, of course, not uncommon in the academic world. Two-body problems do not have easy solutions. We were incredibly lucky to land on something that brought us together again so quickly. Had MIT not opened the new business school last year, and had we not had a chance encounter with an MIT faculty member the year before that, none of this would have ever happened.
When we told people that we were leaving, we started hearing all sorts of stories about the fallout from academics marrying other academics:
- “We did long-distance for five years and two kids.”
- “My wife quit academia and became a stay-at-home mother.”
- “I lived apart from my husband for eight years.”
In many of those stories, I couldn’t help but notice that the two-body problem was more punishing toward the women’s careers. Women generally seem to feel more pressured than men to give up their professional ambitions for the sake of the family.
When I told people about our situation, many invariably asked me why I didn’t just move to California and try to find something there while my husband started his tenure-track job. And I would reply: Because I have a great job here, and it would be unfair to me to give up my tenure-track job so that we could be together while he focused on his tenure-track job. And it wouldn’t be fair to him to expect the opposite.
It is an impossible tradeoff.
On the issue of faculty hiring and families, the only party not negatively affected seems to be the institution. It is relatively easy for colleges and universities to find replacements for tenure-track faculty members. Sure, departments have to spend money on a new search, but the market is rich with well-qualified candidates. Institutions seem to find it easy to ignore the fact that faculty members are people, not robots, and many have families.
When academics decide to settle on a particular campus, that is a big decision — one that many times involves uprooting and moving a number of dependents and significant others. When you accept a tenure-track position, you are signaling that you are open to the possibility of a lifelong career at the institution.
The problem with staying and being productive at any one place, however, is that you have to be happy. And happiness comes from many more sources than just research productivity, teaching, and salary.
We all know that colleges and universities play an incredibly important role in determining the career trajectory of their tenure-track faculty members. What institutions pay less attention to is the major effect their policies and hiring practices have on our personal happiness. It’s time they reworked their spousal-accommodation policies to reflect those realities.
Melati Nungsari is an assistant professor of economics at the Asia School of Business (ASB) in Malaysia. The school, established in 2015, is affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan Management School. Her husband, Sam Flanders, is an assistant professor of economics at ASB. They are both international faculty fellows at MIT Sloan.
