Matt Pritchard

A great essay filled with good advice. There is a lack of good data to use when planning a dual career search strategy.

For what it is worth, I will relay my own dual career job search experiences, but I am not sure the numeric data will be that useful. The initial and boundary conditions are often very different between couples and job searches. I have anecdotal evidence that job hunting success can depend on the following: Are both members of the couple in the same field (planetary/geoscience), the same subfied (geophysics), or totally different fields (planetary and economics)? Does the department already have expertise in the field of the partner or are they interested in this field of study? Are both members of the couple at the same stage in their career? Do both parties in the couple have equal credentials (institutions of study, number and quality of postdoctoral appointments and publications)? Are the members of the couple applying to wide-open searches (e.g., any area of earth/planetary science) or relatively narrow searches that are focused on a subfield. Sometimes these narrow searches are known to the search committee, but the job ad has been written more broadly and can ensnare unsuspecting applicants.

We found that there is also a lot of variation in institutional policies or traditions — some places will reject consideration of dual career couples out of hand, with predictable results for the existence of women scientists in those departments. For example, my wife was offered a job in a department 5 years ago that had about 25 male faculty and zero females. Although the department made at least 4 offers to different female scientists at that time, to this day, they still have zero female faculty, in part because they did not offer tenure track positions to the spouses of these women.

I know some lucky dual career couples that only had to interview once or twice to be hired somewhere as a team, while others settled for non ideal conditions for 10 to 20 years before finding 2 tenure track positions.

In our experience, we were much more successful at receiving interviews when applying as individuals than as a team.

We chose to apply as a team in our 4th year, because we wanted to be up front with institutions that we needed 2 tenure-track positions and we didn’t want to waste anyone’s time. I suspect that we received fewer interviews as a team because not all institutions had 2 positions to offer and those that did thought that the research that my spouse and I do is too similar. We often use the same types of data in our research, but use it to study different problems in different ways. The similarity argument is easier to counter now than it was earlier in our career. For example, we now have a combined 30 successful research proposals under our belts and have only collaborated on 2 of these. While there are many discussions on the web about the relative merits of when to reveal your partner to a search committee, in retrospect, I think we should have continued to apply to jobs individually — at least on the cover letter. The purpose of this letter is to make the short list and get an interview — not to negotiate the final terms of your contract. In the interview, the institution can get to better know one of our research activities and decide whether it is a good match. At that point we could bring up the topic of our spouse and what their research is all about. We could also have a more detailed discussion in person rather than having a committee that is evaluating 100-200 applications try to make sense of what we have written on paper.

My wife and I currently split a single tenure-track position — we are both officially half-time and are evaluated separately for tenure. Lots of people have emotional reactions to the idea of split-positions — I remember that my first reaction when I learned about these positions as a graduate student was horror. These positions are not for everyone and are not economically viable where the cost of living is high and the pay is low. I came to appreciate these positions through example: There are two other couples in my department that have split positions for 30 years and all have had successful careers. In most things, the university treats us as full time faculty: we have the same office/lab space as other members of the department, we each have a full vote in faculty meetings, we receive full health care benefits, etc. You can compare these split positions to the partial “soft-money” and partial “hard-money” research positions that exist at many of the country’s oceanography institutions. In both you have a guaranteed salary (in exchange for teaching and service for the department) but also have more time to do research than regular full-time faculty. The advantage of a split academic position is flexibility — unlike at an oceanographic institution, there is no downside if you don’t raise your salary in a given year via grants. Another advantage is that there is more time available for family and other activities. We have been promised that we will be offered 2 full-time positions in the future, but we haven’t decided whether we would prefer to remain in the split position.