Dr. Shellie

I’m giving a talk next week to the women grad students in my old department about life after grad school.

What do you wish you knew when you were a grad student?

Any interesting comments will go into my talk– speak up!

Some people think that it is much easier for women to get faculty jobs in science and engineering than for men. After all, universities are "under pressure" to hire women, for reasons of political correctness– aren’t they?

A senior faculty told me, a few years back, "Yes, there are incentives for hiring women. But don’t worry– we would never hire anyone we weren’t going to hire anyway." Initially I was mystified by this statement. Now I think I understand what he meant. Here’s my impression.

Basically, getting a faculty job is very competitive. First of all, you need a PhD, possibly postdoc experience (depending on the field), a good research record, strong letters of recommendation, etc. There are many applicants for each position. A number of applicants generally have PhD’s from excellent universities, worked in well-known research groups, and have extensive publication lists.

In any given year, a department may or may not have openings for one or more new faculty members. If there is an opening, the department will advertise the position and solicit applications. They then narrow down the list to about 5 or 6 candidates and invite them to campus to interview. Of these, there will be some number that the department would really like to hire. It could be one, or two, but is probably not all 6. The people in the "want to hire" category all seem intelligent, hard-working, and dynamic, and would all be excellent additions to the research and teaching programs of the department. But the department can’t make offers to everyone, so they will try to rank people. This can be very subjective. Maybe people think that hiring in Candidate A’s subfield is of higher priority this year, or that it is most important that Candidate B could take advantage of a new research facility which is currently underutilized, or that Candidate C’s subfield is the "hottest", and so on. If they really can’t agree, they may not hire anyone.

If the department has more people that it wants to hire than there are openings, it is sometimes possible to "create" another position. This comes down to money. When a new faculty member is hired, the university has to allocate resources for her/his salary and initial startup costs for research equipment. As a result, a department can’t just add new people arbitrarily– the number of openings is determined by a negotiation process with the Dean and/or higher levels of the administration about where the money is coming from. In some (but not all) universities, there may be a little extra money set aside somewhere, maybe at the Dean’s level, to make hiring more flexible. For example, there may be money for strategically hiring star researchers away from competing institutions, or for starting new programs, making spousal hires, or any number of other "special cases", depending on the policies of the university and its governing structure. In some cases, it may be possible for the department to get money (or part of the money) for an extra position from the Dean if one of the people they want to hire is female or a minority. Or not.

So yes, being female can help. But a department will not hire you if they didn’t "want to hire you anyway." When a department hires a new faculty member, that person could potentially be working there for the next 30 years. The consensus among people I have talked to is that no one is going to make an offer to someone they don’t really want– it just isn’t worth it. But if someone is female or a minority, and the department wants them, the department might have an extra mechanism available to hire them.

Of course, you will probably not know which departments this is true of ahead of time. But the bottom line is that if there are particular places you are strongly interested in working, you should see if there might be opportunities there, even if there is no job advertised in your particular field right now. If you have a colleague there, sending them an email with your CV and saying you’d appreciate hearing of any opportunities isn’t a bad idea. If you have your application packet assembled already, you can always try sending it to departments without advertised positions, modifying your cover letter to explain that you have a strong interest in their particular university and would be like to be considered if a position were to open up. You don’t want to waste time (yours and theirs) spamming hundreds of schools, and its best to focus most of your time on places that definitely have jobs. But its also worth putting in a little time to look beyond the advertisements and go after the "dream jobs" that you are really interested in.

By the way, this advice is not just for women and minorities. I know a man who was doing extremely well in his job search and racking up lots of interviews. Several universities offered to "try and open up positions" for him when they realized he was a "hot" candidate. That option is open for anyone lucky enough to be in his situation!

* For the purposes of this discussion, I’m talking about tenure-track assistant professorships in major research universities in the US in science and engineering fields that have significantly less that 50% participation by women. Remove any of those qualifying adjectives and all bets are off– you tell me. 

Our wider circle of friends includes a lot of people who are not academics. They are surprised that we are moving out of the area for my job. Why aren’t we just staying here? I’m surprised to find that many people (including highly-educated professionals and masters-level engineers) don’t know much about how the academic job market works.

They may know that some universities are more prestigious than others (e.g. "Harvard is famous"), but they don’t really understand the difference between research universities, small colleges, and non-research-intensive state schools. They don’t realize that the type of work you do can be very different at each. If I tell them that Postdoc U. wasn’t hiring in my field, they sometimes ask, "Well, did you apply to Masters-Level-State-School-Without-a-PhD-Program-Nearby?" No, I didn’t. I wanted to be at a major research university with the resources I need to do the science I want to do, including research facilities, smart PhD students, and faculty with active research programs.

They don’t know that it is extremely competitive to get a faculty position at a major research university. They don’t know that there are a few hundred applicants for each spot. They don’t fully realize that it takes 5-10 years of specialized training post college before you can apply for such a position. They don’t necessarily think that being a professor is prestigious or a major achievement.

Sometimes though, it turns out that their parents are academics, or they started a PhD program before leaving for industry, or their sister married a guy who is an English professor. Then they get it.

Meanwhile, there are the academics. Some of them are equally clueless. They don’t seem to get why you wouldn’t just move anywhere for the sake of the best (="most prestigious") job.

Fortunately, attitudes in academia are changing. More and more senior professors do understand that location matters. They know this from running searches to recruit new faculty– the major barrier to hiring talented people is location. For some people, "location" means finding a city with a low cost of living to support kids and family. For others, location means finding a job in the same place as a spouse or partner (the "two-body problem"), whether that means two academic jobs or one academic job and one professional job. For others, location means living near parents or extended family, or in the same region they grew up. For now, all these things still tend to be regarded as problematic– if you express a preference in location, people might say that you have "location issues" or "constraints" or a two-body "problem"*. I’d prefer if we could get beyond this idea that having a partner or kids with preferences of their own, or wanting to be near family, or preferring one area of the country over the other, or not wanting to feel too poor to own a house, or any number of other desires and wishes are necessarily "problems," rather than a real part of life as a human and not a robot, and that having no opinion is the norm. But as long as it is so incredibly competitive to get an academic job, and the number of possible jobs fulfilling any one person’s preferences is so low, and the number of other applicants competing for them is so high, and the chance of using your background and training and specialized knowledge outside of academic requires such a major adjustment in what you thought you were going to do for the rest of your life, these things certainly can feel like problems, to the person looking for a job. At least more and more academics are realizing that such "problems" are normal and have to be creatively addressed in order to recruit and retain talented faculty.

Meanwhile, I’m doing a little self-promotion among the non-academics. "I’m really happy to be going to AU," I say. "Getting the job was really competitive. There are over a hundred people applying for each one of these slots. And it’s a location we really like…" I feel a wee bit obnoxious, but it’s worth a try.

* To which I always think, "I’d rather have a two-body problem than not have my husband!"

Now that was cool. I just wrote a letter in support of an extremely famous woman professor to get a big, huge award. Since both the professor and the award are way, way more important than I am, it wasn’t a "recommendation" letter but rather an argument for how important she has been to the field and as a role model for younger women like me. In the course of writing the letter I read over her CV and life history and WOW. Very impressive. I mean, I knew that already, but… wow.

Now of course you will be wondering who this extremely famous woman is… but I shan’t tell you! Instead I think it would be fun if people submitted their guesses in the comments. (If you know me in real life, don’t give away my current or former locations!)

I went to an all-girls high school. At the time, my high school didn’t have all of the upper-level AP* math and science classes that our "brother school" (the boys high school in the area) did. I had a neighbor who was one year ahead of me at the boys high school and was always bragging about his AP Physics and BC Calculus classes, not to mention his older brother who was doing a PhD in Physics at MIT, and I remember feeling quite intimidated. Meanwhile, I cobbled together a curriculum with my high school’s math teacher, who tried to teach me AP Calculus one-on-one despite not having seen the material since she was in college 20 years earlier.

My point here is not that I was math-deprived. My point is that I was intimidated by "science boys" from very early on. When I went to college, people warned me not to go to MIT, because the boys from Bronx Science would be way ahead of me. While I didn’t go to MIT (ugly campus, strong fraternity system– neither seemed appealing), the science boys came back to haunt me. When I went to Undergrad U, there were in fact a couple of guys from a similar science magnet school, who had apparently taken graduate-level math while still in high school. And I assumed that all the guys in my science classes were probably like my neighbor, and had taken "real" AP Calc and Physics. Though I ended up with really good grades at the end of my first semester, I assumed it was because I made up for my stupidity and lack of training my frequenting the TA’s office hours.

Meanwhile, other wackily advanced science boys presented themselves. For example, there was a Russian guy who was about 3 years ahead of everyone else in courses. And then there were all these annoying guys who had somehow finished the problem set 2 days earlier than anyone else and got to lord it over everyone else by carefully doling out hints to the answers. There were also some nice guys, who I did problem sets with — they weren’t jerks, though they were usually kind of nerdy.

Meanwhile, where were the girls?** Well, actually, there weren’t any. Oh sure, there were a few other girls in my classes (maybe 3 or 4 in a class of 50). But one was an econ major and doing math on the side, and the other was somehow not keeping up with everyone else and anyhow was a year younger and never washed her hair, and then another had chronic problems with not getting her work done, and the other one had some sort of weird health problem that made her skin grey (yeah, what was that?), and then there was my friend the superstar who was a year older than me and so good at doing her problem sets that she could go hang out in cool coffee shops the night before they were due, but anyway she went to high school in the former-Communist bloc so that was somehow a different story (hi r&o, if you’re reading!). Basically, all the other (small number of) women in my classes seemed so anomalous that it didn’t really feel like there were other women doing science.

For most smart American students, going to college is the time when you find out that you are not the smartest person in the world– that there are lots of people out there who are smarter than you. Suddenly you become a small fish in a big pond, and all that. But for smart American girls in math and science? Those "people" who are smarter than you are most likely boys (do the numbers!). And so the (quite reasonable) message that you aren’t the smartest person in the world can easily get confused with another message: boys are smarter than you. And somehow (at least for me) all those boys in the class getting worse grades than me didn’t seem to register. Whenever I had the fear that I wasn’t good enough or smart enough to do science, it was the boys I was worried about.

Which makes me wonder… I know that some men have this fear as well: that maybe they are not good enough or smart enough to do science. I wonder who are they worried about– is it those same mythical boys from Bronx Science? Or Russians? Or PhD’s from MIT?

I would love it if everyone could just get over it and do some science.  

*For any non-Americans readers: AP stands for "Advanced Placement." These are nominally courses that high school students can take to get college credit, but are in fact practically prerequisites for admission to top US universities.

**I’m using "boys" and "girls" in this story, not "men" and "women", ‘cause that’s what I thought of them as.