January-February 2005

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The Two-Body Problem: Dual-Career-Couple Hiring Practices in Higher Education

Reviewed by Jerry A. Jacobs and Sarah Winslow

Lisa Wolf-Wendel, Susan B. Twombly, and Suzanne Rice.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003

In The Two-Body Problem: Dual-Career-Couple Hiring Practices in Higher Education, Lisa Wolf-Wendel, Susan Twombly, and Suzanne Rice tackle a timely issue—how academic institutions assist dual-career couples in finding employment for accompanying spouses and partners. Our own research reveals that dual-career couples are wide-spread in academia. Data from the 2000 census indicate that 87 percent of all female full-time faculty and 56 percent of all male full-time faculty have spouses employed full time, most of whom are professionals or managers. More-over, our analysis of data from the 1999 National Study of Postsecondary Faculty reveals that over 20 percent of full-time faculty (22 percent of women and 20 percent of men) have spouses employed in professional positions in higher education, with over 13 percent married to an employee of the same institution. Policies directed at dual-career couples are thus clearly applicable to a large proportion of faculty members.

Wolf-Wendel and her colleagues fill an important lacuna in the literature, examining dual-career policies from the perspective of institutions and policy makers rather than the individuals who utilize them. Drawing on a survey of 360 institutions of higher education and on case studies of five colleges and universities, the authors present a detailed and multifaceted portrait of institutional po-licies and practices. While the authors en-vision an audience of administrators and policy makers, this book will no doubt be of interest to a larger audience of scholars interested in faculty employment and work-life issues, as well as to academics facing their own two-body problems.

The book begins by detailing the results of the authors' survey. While the vast majority (80 percent) of colleges and universities in their sample report that spouse and partner accommodations were important, only one-quarter report having such policies. Of those that do, less than one-half (42 percent) have written policies, with larger, richer research universities leading the way. Geographically isolated schools are more likely to pursue some faculty accommodations, especially regarding offering faculty positions to both spouses. While their goal is to make an institution competitive in attracting and retaining high-caliber faculty members, such policies are not without their challenges. The authors identify issues including cross-department communication problems, concerns over departmental autonomy, and questions regarding the quality of an accompanying spouse or partner. Institutions without policies often lack the resources to implement such programs. The authors present a complex picture of the actors—administrators, standing faculty, and new recruits—and issues—equity, legality, autonomy, institutional success, and personal happiness—involved in creating and implementing dual-career accommodation policies in academia.

The book's subsequent chapters flesh out this portrait in greater detail, drawing on the case studies. Each chapter focuses on a particular policy and practice: relocation services, non-tenure-track or adjunct positions for accompanying spouses, split and shared positions, shared advertising, and tenure-track positions for accompanying spouses.

Relocation services are the easiest form of accommodation service to fund and administer. Such programs range from networking programs to writing letters of introduction to accompany the faculty spouse's job applications to offering nonemployment information, such as information about schools and doctors in the local area. Employing accompanying spouses in non-tenure-track faculty positions, although not the ideal situation from the perspective of accompanying spouses, was the most common accommodation practice uncovered by the authors.

In discussing shared and split positions, the authors conclude that, if handled properly, such positions are beneficial to both institutions and faculty couples—essentially allowing institutions to hire two faculty members for nearly the price of one and giving academic couples the ability to live and work in the same place. Such positions are not without their disadvantages, with the two most common complaints of shared-position faculty being salary and workload, since both partners often end up working nearly full time.

The authors refer to two tenure-track positions at the same institution as "the holy grail of dual-career accommodations." While the most desired form of accommodation, this is also the most complicated, most controversial, and least available. Even when the stars of two-position accommodation—"luck, timing, and cooperation, combined with the needs of an academic unit and the qualifications of the spouse or partner"—align, the resulting situation is not without controversy, as the relative rarity of such positions heightens both attention to and backlash against them.

The authors suggest that the growing number of dual-career couples will encourage academic institutions to adopt more accommodation policies. Surely this makes sense for such broadly based and low-cost policies as spousal relocation offices. But the authors also suggest that a growing demand for faculty will contribute to the wider adoption of more expensive and consequential accommodation policies, including offering both partners tenure-track positions. Here we are more skeptical. The growth of an academic underclass of adjuncts and part-time faculty has limited academic hiring in recent years, and we expect this trend to continue. As a result, remaining tenure-track positions will be scarcer and more precious than ever, leading few schools to routinely help both partners obtain regular academic appointments. More likely are increasing offers of temporary positions to accompanying spouses. This is a shame, because women are disproportionately concentrated in these secondary positions, thus limiting the number of women in tenured positions and reinforcing gender inequality in academia.

The Two-Body Problem is an important first step in furthering our understanding of dual-career accommodation policies in academia. The authors direct our attention to the variety of policies and practices currently in place, as well as their advantages and disadvantages for both institutions and faculty couples. Our knowledge on this topic would be further advanced by work combining the focus of Wolf-Wendel and colleagues on the administrative side of the story with an evaluation of such policies from the point of view of faculty recruits. Are prospective faculty aware of these policies? If so, how heavily do they weigh on new hires' decisions to accept or reject a job offer? What do accompanying spouses have to say about these accommodation policies? To what extent does the formal institutionalization of such policies affect their use and effectiveness? Finally, it would be interesting to gather more information on the types of schools offering dual-career accommodation benefits—their faculty make-up, dominant departments, and their location vis-à-vis other institutions of higher education. We suspect that aggressive effort by schools in relatively isolated areas to pursue hiring both partners could strengthen their faculty and put pressure on other schools to better accommodate spouses.

Jerry Jacobs is professor in the sociology department at the University of Pennsylvania, and Sarah Winslow is an advanced graduate student in the same program.