It’s a predicament faced by scores of scholars, and it goes by many names: The two-body problem. The dual-career couple. The trailing spouse. How do do two scholars in a relationship land jobs at the same institution? For job candidates trying to negotiate an offer, and for institutions trying to seal the deal with one promising professor by offering a spot for their significant other, it can be a thorny question.
Now, a research team at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has documented, seemingly for the first time, how receptive the nation’s leading research universities are to partner hires, ranking every R1 institution in a newly published scorecard. Their work is not only broadly relevant — studies have found that more than one-third of academic researchers are in a relationship with another scholar — but also, they argue, timely, given the positive effects that recruiting and retaining partner hires can have on institutions’ diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.
For the project’s primary investigators, it’s also a matter of personal interest. Torin Monahan and Jill A. Fisher, both professors at Chapel Hill, have been an academic couple since graduate school, and together have navigated the partner-hire process at three different institutions. They’re often asked by graduate students and early-career scholars for advice, and while they’re happy to offer it based on their own success — and on experiences where institutions have been resistant to extend them a partner hire — they’ve also noted the lack of a centralized resource for couples on the job market. That’s what Fisher and Monahan hope their scorecard provides. “We wanted to imagine what it would be like for a job seeker who was, at the moment, trying to navigate the job market and had a dual-career relationship,” said Monahan, a professor in the department of communication. “What would they be able to find out if they really scoured these websites and tried to read everything that was available?”
A lot, as it turns out. Fisher and Monahan developed a scoring system based primarily on eight factors, such as whether institutions offer tenure-track, fixed-term, nonfaculty positions (or a combination thereof) to partner hires, whether they have a dual-career office and website, and whether start-up funding was available to partner hires. Of 146 R1 institutions, nearly two-thirds indicated publicly that they create faculty positions for partner hires, though just over half of the 129 universities with available information said specifically that those could be tenure-track jobs. (Monahan and Fisher’s team gathered their data through extensive term searches on Google and university websites, examining policies and faculty handbooks, faculty-senate meeting records, and any other documents their search results unearthed.) Only three institutions — Duke University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Colorado’s Anschutz Medical Campus — explicitly stated that they did not create faculty jobs for partner hires, and 17 institutions didn’t turn up any information on partner hiring.
The five highest-scoring universities on the scorecard were the University of Delaware, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Maine, the University of California at Davis, and Ohio State University’s main campus.
Public institutions, Fisher and Monahan found, were significantly more likely than their private counterparts to have information available on their partner-hiring processes and to create both faculty and nonfaculty positions for partners (82 percent of public institutions and 41 percent of private ones were willing to facilitate faculty jobs; for nonfaculty hiring, those percentages were 68 and 47 percent, respectively).
Another factor that made institutions more receptive to partner hiring was whether they’d received Advance grants, which are administered by the National Science Foundation, and which promote gender equity in academic STEM fields. That’s partly why Monahan and Fisher chose to examine R1 universities; they have received the majority of Advance grants, which frequently fund dual-career programs. Indeed, 80 percent of the R1 institutions that have been awarded Advance grants specifically dedicated to new programs had a mechanism for hiring partners into faculty jobs, compared to 62 percent of those who have not.
While the imprimatur of an Advance grant isn’t a “panacea,” as Monahan put it, the program does “expect and require administrative cooperation and explicit support of the projects being proposed, in a way that isn’t necessarily the case for individual faculty-led research projects.” That emphasis is especially important because women in STEM are even more likely than their peers in other disciplines to have academic partners, Fisher, a professor in the department of social medicine, notes.
Scholarly Productivity
The dual-career dilemma contributes to academe’s “leaky pipeline” for women, and members of racial, ethnic, sexual, and gender-minority populations, Fisher and Monahan write in a report that accompanies their scorecard. They’ve also cited scholarship showing that women’s top reason for declining an academic job offer is the inability to secure a position for their partner, and that women are also more likely than men to resign if their partners can’t find work. Both halves of partner hires, on the other hand, are on average more productive than scholars not hired together.
A surprise to Fisher and Monahan was the regional differences in their findings: Universities in the Northeast, they concluded, were least likely to make any sort of partner-hire accommodations, with the smallest proportion of institutions offering faculty jobs and the largest proportion leaving it unclear whether they do so. That might be because of the “relative density” of academic institutions there, they hypothesize; administrators may figure that job candidates can find work for their partners at another university. Institutions in the Midwest appeared particularly hospitable to partner hiring, which Monahan said could be touted as a recruitment tool: “If they feel like they can’t be as competitive in terms of geography, well, there are other things they could do” — and, apparently, are doing — “to attract the top academic talent and encourage them to move to those locations.”
Location, the researchers know, is one of several factors that might be crucial to couples looking for jobs together. That’s why they made their scorecard filterable: by eight geographic regions; universities’ status as Hispanic- or minority-serving institutions; whether start-up support or job-placement services were available; and the likelihood of both faculty and nonfaculty jobs being made available. Each university’s page on the scorecard’s website also links to that university’s own resources, in hopes of easing the search process for prospective hires.
While there is no longitudinal data with which to compare the scorecard, Fisher said that, based on her team’s observations and the literature on partner hiring, “it does seem like there is more emphasis on transparency now. It does seem like there are more institutions that are recognizing the importance of partner hiring now.” That’s evidenced in the enthusiastic response the researchers got in response to the project. They reached out to all 146 institutions to offer the chance to provide information they hadn’t been able to find online; more than 100 administrators and staff members responded, many of them offering to explain their institution’s policies over phone or Zoom calls.
Of course, a high ranking doesn’t guarantee success for any given academic couple: “We’re not saying that these institutions will absolutely make faculty positions for someone’s partner, but they have a track record of doing so,” Fisher said. But she does hope the project acts as a measuring stick for partners as they decide where to apply. She and Monahan also think it has potential to “nudge” lower-scoring institutions to improve their standing — and provide examples among their peers of how to do so. (The pair have also published an article that outlines methods of supporting academic couples.) The scorecard could even increase awareness of partner-hire policies within institutions. “Oftentimes, department chairs or even deans may not know what offerings they have at their own university or how to go about invoking them,” Monahan said. “Say you’re a department chair and you have a partner-hire request, and your dean is being cagey about it, well, maybe our scorecard could give you the links to the policies that could help you make a case for the position that you want to create.”
Monahan and Fisher see their project as being as much a public-service effort and an advocacy tool as it is scholarship. “There is a comparative dimension to this,” Monahan said, “and we have all kinds of other ranking systems of universities out there, but not necessarily from this particular perspective.”
