Dual careers in science

I spent a good chunk of today in a symposium about dual career hiring in academia. While the problem tuns throughout all of higher education, the focus was on STEM. I live tweeted as many talks as I could attend before I had to run off to class.

Our president said he was going to support dual hires, though the shape of this isn’t clear yet. But when you have buy-in from administration at the top, it makes things a lot easier. I hope that when be become a new university, we will be able to build in dual hire policies from the ground floor.

In conversation over lunch, I asked one speaker about whether state laws would prevent dual hires. She said no, because most nepotism laws had been struck down for being discriminatory against women. This interested me, given how often our search committee had been instructed to consider someone’s ability to do the job, and only their work related abilities, for legal reasons. There is clearly much more room to maneuver on these matters than I thought, and I’ve been done a lot of search committees.

I thank Biochembelle profusely, who took it upon herself to Storify my tweets:

External links

UTPA Advance Symposium home page
Stanford report on dual career hiring practices