Re: [Phys-l] Women Earn 46% of Undergraduate Math Degrees butRepresent Only 8% of Math Professors ??

[John Denker <jsd@av8n.com>]

Michael Edmiston wrote:

> I have been fairly outspoken that we should not hire husband-wife teams. 

So, whom would you hire: Pierre, or Marie, or neither?

> In those cases that we do, I have been outspoken that they should not be 
> in the same department.  I am also on record that one cannot be the 
> chair of the other.  I also am on record that they should not be 
> eligible to serve on the same committee at the same time.  Am I being 
> unreasonable?

We can agree that there is potential for disaster with hiring husband-and-wife
team....

  OTOH, the way I see it, there is potential for disaster with any new hire.
  I put a huuuge amount of effort into vetting recruits, but I never really
  know what I'm getting.

More specifically:  The first such team I hired was a flaming disaster.
Bad beyond description.  Bad beyond belief.  I swore I would never make
that mistake again....

  OTOH, a couple of years later, I was schnookered into a seemingly-
  analogous situation.  Party A, who was pretty good, went on leave,
  presumably never to be seen again.  I hired Party B, who was reeeally
  good.  Then Party A wanted to come back to work.  I was trapped.  I
  was off-scale unhappy about it.  But it turned out to be no problem.
  Actually it was great.  I paid them for X+X amount of work, but I
  got more than that out of them, because they apparently talked about
  work-related stuff in their off hours.

  Since then I've seen lots of similar situations that worked just
  fine.

Bottom line:

1) I treat marital status just like any other "prejudice".  I don't
judge people by race, creed, color, sex ... or spouse.  I judge each
individual one by one.

If I want to hire 'em both, I hire 'em both.

I don't like to hire "packages".  If I wouldn't hire each of them
separately, I don't like to hire them both together.  This creates
all sorts of problems -- some obvious, some not-so-obvious -- in the
long run.  But I'm not super-dogmatic about that, either.  In some
sense similar situations arise with any merger or acquisition:  you
get a package, including strong players and weak players.  Sometimes
it is expedient to acquire the package and sort it out later.

I have seen situations where Party A was consistently rated at the
top of the organization, while Party B was consistently rated at the
bottom.  The lesson here is simple:  Don't think that the hiring
dilemma is the last of your dilemmas.

A particularly bad case, as others have mentioned, is where the
first department is pressuring the second department to do something
they wouldn't naturally have done.  Within a department, there are
ways of making the tradeoff.  Between departments, the mechanisms
usually aren't there.  Is the first department willing to pay both
persons' salaries in perpetuity?  If not, then they shouldn't get
much of a say in the second department's hiring decision.

All the problems are much worse in small towns.  I know one large
university that is notorious for underpaying its secretaries, because
they can hire faculty spouses as super-overqualified secretaries, and
supply exceeds demand.

=====

Bottom line:  It's mosly like any other hiring decision:  Sometimes
there is an easy yes, sometimes there's an easy no, and the rest of
the cases you have to argue about.  And there's residual risk no
matter what.  Such is life.