"We will just take a little more time to keep you in tenure limbo for each child you have. It will be family friendly."
The buried story here is that in the 1980s and before, women and men were equally likely to get tenure!
A year per kid? So you have enough time to extend tenure decision until middle age at least, or whenever menopause hits.
Am I a terrible person because my first reaction to the story was "Who cares about Economists?"?
I suppose I am.
Delaying the tenure decision can definitely be a mixed bag depending on what sort of colleagues you have. In principle, they're supposed to apply the same standards they would for the normal pre-tenure period, but in practice people can be jerks. In other words, what Trivers said in 1.
My friend's perception was that the year needed to be a mega-crank-papers-out year in order to stay competitive. She had a baby, took a year, and did not in fact get tenure.
In principle, they're supposed to apply the same standards they would for the normal pre-tenure period
"Standards" sounds so appealingly well-defined!
Yeah, so I assume the mechanism here is that the men get 14% more time to build their tenure case, while the women are able, at best, to get to where the men used to be, but with tenure committees that are less sympathetic to circumstances?
The mechanism builds off intra-household inequity, no? A father getting another year is going to spend a lot less of the freed-up time actively caring for the child, doing housework, etc. than a mother is.
Right. I mean, worst-case scenario, but one that seems fairly plausible given the results, is that you've got a man and a woman who each extend their tenure track by a year for parenting. She spends the year giving birth and doing infant care, and ends up no more productive over eight years than she would have been over seven, and the tenure committee looks at the extension as a special favor she got for being a woman, and jacks up the standard she has to meet a little. The man, on the other hand, does little or no parenting work in that year, and turns out a fair amount of additional work-product as a result. Also, the committee looks at his taking a tenure extension as evidence that he was doing an unusual amount of parenting work, and is as a result particularly forgiving of any flaws in his record.
That's extreme in both directions, but none of it looks unlikely.
This is horrible, obviously, but I'm unclear about what would be a supposedly better solution. Surely it's not not giving men paternity leave, which only reinforces the stereotype that it should be women doing the primary child rearing.
The only solution I can think of is requiring tenure committees to be all-women. But I'm not even sure that would necessarily fix the problem.
The solution is simple -- eliminate tenure!
This is not a workable idea, but I was toying with the possibility that people who were productive during their extension year might be penalized for it. That is, if you publish a couple of papers during the year where you got an extension because you were going to focus on parenting, your extension gets revoked. But there's almost certainly no way to do that fairly.
1: Most schools will still allow you to go up for tenure earlier if you so desire.
This is actually an issue for people in my department who were hired around the same time I was. One of us is a guy who's taken a semester of paternity leave, twice, which has automatically added two years to his tenure clock. Fwiw, his wife is a SAHM. He brags about how this gave him more time to write.
Meanwhile, I've taken two semesters off for cancer/mental health, but because they were during the same academic year I am having to jump through all sorts of hoops to have my dean approve adding two years to my clock. The wait while we jump through hoops, incidentally, is complicating my ability to apply for research leave (which is based on my official contract year status), and consequently leading to problems for the department that doesn't know whether it needs to hire an adjunct for any given semester. None of my situation is a direct result of paternity leave, of course, and I'm grateful for the generous leave that I've gotten, which is far better than is available to non-faculty staff. The disparate treatment is still driving me nuts, though.
How about first we fight for universal family leave, probably more for mothers than fathers, then we work out what this means in academia.
A possible solution is to allow all parents to take a semester of parenting leave following birth or adoption, but to reserve the extension of the tenure clock to people who were the primary stay-at-home parent.
14: If course we should fight for universal family leave. In the meantime, though, this is a policy that contributes to the lack of women at higher ranks in academia, and the academics among us should therefore be concerned.
Suggestions for countering this: standards for tenure that are quantifiable, or considering one's top papers or projects with the most weight.
It's not surprising to me at all that men tend to use it as research leave; even now tenure track men seem to be very likely to have a stay at home wife.
12: Impossible in the humanities. Most of my writing is done off the clock and there's often months between submitting a paper and presenting it. Not doing anything on leave would have meant 18 months of a dead pipeline.
That is, if you publish a couple of papers during the year where you got an extension because you were going to focus on parenting, your extension gets revoked. But there's almost certainly no way to do that fairly.
It would also create a hilariously intricate and bizarre set of incentives, given the lag times between doing research, writing the papers based on it, and those papers being published. The latter of those times especially can stretch out for months or longer, which add in all kinds of weird effects.
Like in a lot of problems in academia the real solution would be to have the people responsible for tenure decisions (or whoever else was involved) not act like dicks to each other. And the chances of that are about what you'd expect, especially when it comes to things with really long term (and, for them, personal) consequences like tenure decisions.
Also, if men father children with multiple women, then can extend the clock for their entire lives.
20: Sounds like a premise for a David Lodge novel! Or at least a sub-plot.
Having been through my second miscarriage while being a post-doc, I'm starting to think that penalizing men, just for not having to go through pregnancy-related stuff, might be a good idea. I'd be open to penalizing them for not dealing with period-related stuff too.
Admittedly, I was super lucky that the first miscarriage was scheduled for a weekend (after I had missed all or parts of three days for appointments (first the happy, then the sad) and the second happened on a weekend.
I get to keep up with all the guys plus deal with medical issues!
It is also funny-not-haha to see my over-achieving, privileged PI deal with a pregnant (SAHM) wife and a 2 year old. Guess who never comes into the office? Who I can't schedule a meeting with? Who hasn't yet learned to balance his work and home life? So lucky.
Probably worth posting this here...
23: Wow. So do we chalk this up to "science journalism sucks" or to "Economists are desperately over eager to reach counter intuitive 'gotcha' conclusions" or both?
I was about to post 23, which I think makes a pretty convincing case that this study sucks (indeed, it seems like a good rule of thumb that if a study makes the news it's probably sloppy and wrong). That said, I do buy the argument here (just not the data in the study).
In the sciences at schools that aren't essear's does anyone not get tenure anymore? It seems to me that in order to actually get a TT job you need to have done enough research as a postdoc to already shave fulfilled the tenure expectations even if you do close to nothing. I suppose humanities might be trickier since people haven't done postdocs, but conversely it's even harder to get a job so it seems implausible that people would get rejected.
23: Damn, according to that analysis, the NYT piece might as well have been reported by Shankar ("If someone published a study about it, it must be true for all humankind") Vedantam.
In the sciences at schools that aren't essear's does anyone not get tenure anymore?
It's pretty easy. Just fail to bring in enough grant $$.
Also, the research you did as a postdoc will generally have been some sub-project that was part of your postdoc advisor's research program. Once you land a TT job, you're expected to get your own independent program off the ground.
In the sciences at schools that aren't essear's does anyone not get tenure anymore?
Yes. Half of tenure-track people fail to get tenure, it seems to me as a general rule. It mostly depends on getting grant funding. Also, much of your salary depends on getting grant funding. Also, none of the research you did as a postdoc counts. Why would it?
The basic expectation is that being hired to a tenure-track job means you get tenure as long as you maintain research funding. This used to be easy to do. Now it's not. And the department can't support a bunch of professors without research funding anyway. Since the word "professor" means "someone who spends all day trying to get research funding, and also teaches maybe 12 lectures a year", such people are just seen as useless.
Thank you for reminding me why I never considered a postdoc or academic career track.
22
Personally I think honest-to-god quotas in academic hiring are pretty appealing. Then you don't have to worry about tweaking exactly how much to penalize anybody.
29: Half?? That doesn't seem right to me at all. Are you sure you're not counting people who left for a better job elsewhere? Do you have a reference? The numbers in the first place I found on google are mostly in the 75-90% range, which is in line with my anecdata.
In the sciences at schools that aren't essear's does anyone not get tenure anymore?
Don't forget Princeton, Stanford, MIT, and Chicago. But yeah, in my field every single person at every other school gets tenure. "Half of tenure-track people fail to get tenure" is way off the mark in any field I'm familiar with. That's basically true of MIT physics and most people at other places view it as scandalously bad.
Also, much of your salary depends on getting grant funding.
Also not remotely close to the experience of anyone I know. I guess this is a medicine versus everyone else thing.
Come to think of it, I know one person in more or less my field at a school not among the five previously mentioned who failed to get tenure. He was part of a medium-large experimental collaboration and pissed off the leadership to the point that they wouldn't support him, as far as I can tell.
The department at essaer U that I was in had the practice in the 80s and 90s of rejecting people on the principle that if their tenure rate was too high it meant they weren't pushing assistant profs hard enough. Someone told them they were stupid and by the time I got there they started a string of continuous promotions that was only broken relatively recently and which pissed some people off because they felt that it was a "it's been too long since we rejected someone" situation. Rejected person ended up tenured at equally prestigious west coast school.
Yeah, half is too low. It's half in my experience, with an n of 2 professors who were hired at the same time. Not exactly representative. The various other "professors" who gave up and left were never on the tenure track.
But 30 is all correct. In fact I think people might be less likely to get tenure at lower-prestige institutions, because they are less likely to get research funding. The department might as well try again with a new hire.
But 30 is all correct.
In your field, maybe. Certainly not in mine, where a large fraction of funding is in the form of group grants that new faculty join onto as a matter of course when they are hired. Getting individual funding is an important part of a tenure case only at the most elite schools, and at those it's in no way decisive.
Group grants would be a much better system than the system I see. There's so much redundancy and waste in everybody being part of an individual "lab" of somewhere between 3 and 8 people.
Salary is only dependent on funding if you are "soft money" position. These are largely limited to med schools and institutes. These positions exploded during the legendary NIH doubling, but are disappearing as NIH funding gets tighter.
Traditional science departments have large required classes to teach, and thus nearly all positions there are "hard money", where you are required to teach at least one course per term and 9 months of salary is guaranteed via teaching. Grant funding is required if you want the remaining 3 months of salary.
Funding is still the primary criterion for tenure, though it doesn't have to be tremendous amounts if other factors compensate.
My anecdata suggest that my field has tenure rates of 75-90% as well. Even the notorious big 5 appear to be over 50% these days.
I think group grants are much bigger in physics than other fields, especially the physics that requires enormously expensive and unique equipment, right?
It really depends on how close to the biomedical-ish fields you are. In biomed oriented departments, tenure is essentially contingent on getting at least 1 major independent NIH grant. That used to be not too hard to do, but now, paylines are hovering around 10%. So a fair number of people are not getting tenure.
23: One thing I was less convinced by was that the analysis shouldn't have been limited to 'getting tenure at the school you started at'. IMnon-excessiveE, people can often go to new schools because they feel/it has been suggested, they won't get tenure at original school. And they tend to move to less prestigious schools and bargain tenure qualifications in a way they couldn't before.
I also know of people moving to private industry or gov't because tenure wasn't likely but before they were officially refused.
Delinking (as someone whose job it is to advocate for these kinds of policies): Argh. This story (and study--thanks, 23!) is awful. Not only is Econ as a field notoriously unfriendly to women (and why would we generalize from it to all fields?), but it blames the policy for not fixing something that is entirely beyond its scope. If formal punishment (per LB's 12) isn't really feasible, a good bit of social shaming of those dudes boasting about their parental-leave productivity sounds just fine. Not to mention better charged promotion and tenure committees.
45: and a pony?
Just kidding. Those are all good points and it's great to have someone who's working on this sort of thing. Welcome!
I think one thing this thread has demonstrated is that there's really a lot of variance between fields and institutions, even within the natural sciences, and humanities/social science might well be a different planet.
Superior alternative policy: impose legal minimum age of 40 for starting postgraduate degrees.
Benefits:
1) This cuts off the degree-inflation problem in the job market at the BA level. It's a common complaint that entry-level jobs which formerly required secondary school education now demand degrees, and entry-level jobs which required degrees now demand postgraduate qualifications. If none of the candidates have masters' degrees, because they're all far too young, then you can't demand them, can you? Nor can you restrict yourself to hiring older candidates with postgrad degrees, because like hell a 44-year-old is going to want your entry-level position. No, you'll have to hire a BA and like it.
2) This will reduce dropout rates in postgraduate programmes - you won't simply fall into a postgrad programme because you can't think what else to do. You'll have to want it.
3) By the time they start their postgraduate work, their kids will be (at least) at school age and so less of a burden.
4) Funding will be easier: forty-year-olds will have paid off their undergraduate debts and will have assets of their own they can borrow against, and/or employers willing to sponsor them.
5) They'll be more mature and thus less of an administrative and welfare burden for universities, because they'll be able to run their own lives.
6) Provides convenient structure within which to have a mid-life crisis/change of career.
Related to 6, of course: easy access to undergraduates for 40-year-olds having mid-life crises. This happens anyway, but in the present system it's the professors sharking the undergraduates, which is wrong and unethical, whereas after this reform it would be the postgrads, which is quite OK.
7) addresses the problem of unemployed postgraduates in two ways: first, there will be fewer of them; second, they will have 15 or 20 years of pre-postgraduate employment history and experience to fall back on.
8) provides impetus for a proper career track of professional Research Assistant, with promotion prospects etc, rather than simply leaving this to underpaid, inexperienced, overworked graduate students who are doing it on their way to getting a DPhil.
Potential employers should see the above as my application for the post of Emergency Replacement Yglesias. I am equally overeducated and overconfident, and happy to pontificate Slate-style on pretty much anything regardless of knowledge, but I at least know what sex Evelyn Waugh was.
52: How about Evelyn Underhill? I think your reforms might work in the UK, but in the US law and medicine are postgraduate degrees. I think we would do okay without the extra lawyers, but we might need to make some new doctors.
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53: good point. An exception could be made for medical students.
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48.3: not everyone has kids before 40. (Much less 35, which is roughly what "school age by the time you're 40" implies.)
51 "8) provides impetus for a proper career track of professional Research Assistant, with promotion prospects etc"
MIT used to have non-academics who were "professional" RAs and even project managers, at least in the CS department. I was one for a while. There was, however, little opportunity for promotion; no true career track.
59: very true. But most people do - certainly most women do. About 0.5% of women in the US give birth for the first time after the age of 40. The mean age is 26. And don't forget that the mean age would almost certainly fall among the population of potential postgraduates, because they would not be putting off childbirth in order to do postgraduate degrees!
Definitely one of the potential-future stories I tell myself is "you could go back to school at 40, once Selah's settled in school!" But that really seems stunningly unlikely, even with good retirement savings and a tiny mortgage payment. Certainly people do it all the time, but it's not the norm or the way the system is set up and I doubt academic rather than more vocational (MSW, Education) programs would have any interest at all. (Plus I have no idea what I want to do with my life, so this isn't a particularly meaningful plan in the first place.)
because they would not be putting off childbirth in order to do postgraduate degrees
Based purely on anecdotal evidence, I don't think this is the only reason that women pursuing postgraduate degrees postpone childbirth.
About 0.5% of women in the US give birth for the first time after the age of 40. The mean age is 26.
It's not the age at the time of the first childbirth that matters, it's the age at the time of the last childbirth. You'd have to be done having kids by age 35.
64 is quite right of course. Good point.
Nah, keep the age limit for med students too. They also need the extra time to be sure that's what they want to do. And we can cut down on the insane work hours that the med schools seem to think are necessary, but are really just a form of hazing.
64: Surely the 5 year old can take care if the younger ones.
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