Gendered and Racialized Career Sacrifices of Women Faculty Accepting Dual-Career Offers

Abstract

Dual-career hiring is crucial to cultivating gender equity in the professoriate. Women are more likely than men to be in an academic couple, therefore institutions that do not use dual-career hiring systematically disadvantage women in faculty hiring. Yet, institutional resistance to dual-career hiring is not the only obstacle hindering women in academic couples from entering and progressing in the faculty ranks. Women also make decisions about their employment within a broader social context where gendered norms privilege men’s careers. Gendered norms and gender expectations pressure women in heterosexual couples to make choices that prioritize their partner’s career. In this article, I analyze couple and individual interviews with nine heterosexual faculty couples of color to explore how women make career sacrifices when accepting dual-career offers. I argue that liberal and post-structural feminist theories are insufficient for understanding the career choices of women of color and illustrate how intersectionality is a useful analytical lens for shedding light on racialized factors informing their decisions. The findings extend past understanding by elaborating on not only how women’s position type (e.g., tenure-track vs. clinical) and rank (e.g., tenured vs. not tenured) are seen as negotiable, but also how women sacrifice their institutional and departmental fit. For women of color, these career sacrifices are racialized in ways that are detrimental to their inclusion and job satisfaction. The findings shed light on how gendered career decisions and institutional norms converge to perpetuate women’s underrepresentation in the tenure system and full professor ranks.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ This remains the definitive source for rates of academic coupling (see, Laursen & Austin, 2020).

² I use “first hire” when referring to the partner who receives an initial offer and negotiates for their partner, and “second hire” when referring to their partner, “to overcome the negative terms often applied to this partner, such as ‘trailing spouse’” (Schiebinger et al., 2008, p. 15).

³ Various education and social science fields.