The unintended consequences of tenure timeouts
June 28, 2016 10:11 AM   Subscribe

The bombshell finding was that, when comparing candidates for tenure, the success rate for male candidates increased by 19.4 percentage points after stopping the clock was offered. For women, the rate fell by 22.4 percentage points.

Heather Antecol of Claremont McKenna College, and Kelly Bedard and Jenna Stearns of the University of California, Santa Barbara focused on 49 top economics departments and examined the impact of clock-stopping policies that are open (as has become the norm) to both male and female professors who become parents. Stopping the clock typically involves giving tenure candidates an extra year before they are evaluated for tenure. Notably, stopping the clock does not require a leave of absence, so the extra time covers a period when faculty members are in many cases working and being paid. The study (pdf) was based on data about 1,299 assistant professors hired by these departments between 1985 and 2004.
posted by Dashy (54 comments total) 14 users marked this as a favorite
 
Trying to publish in [the top five] journals, while desirable to any up-and-coming economist, is also risky, due to their higher rejection rates than other journals. The authors of the new paper speculate that male economists who become fathers are taking the extra year on the tenure track not to nurture their offspring, but to write more articles and to have time to submit them to top journals. They then had time, if rejected by those journals, to submit elsewhere.

If you want to imagine the face I'm making right now, you'll need to picture the expression Kermit the Frog makes when Jim Henson just makes his hand into a fist.
posted by Mayor West at 10:22 AM on June 28, 2016 [52 favorites]


Yup. I'm an assistant professor, and I will never forget being cornered in the hallway by another assistant prof - a man - who told me excitedly that I should really consider having a baby soon, because it would stop my clock and when his wife had a baby, he wrote a book while on paternity leave. I could write a book too, on maternity leave! Leaving aside the extreme sociopathy that is having a child to stop your tenure clock, maternity leave and paternity leave are not the same thing, at all.
posted by sockermom at 10:28 AM on June 28, 2016 [57 favorites]


I know of only one other male faculty member who actually took care of his kid on family leave. Even for the two of us (who I think did a reasonable job e.g taking night time feedings, etc) we weren't breast feeding, we weren't pregnant, we weren't recovering from post-birth complications. I know of one male colleague who, when officially the "primary caregiver," left for a month for an international collaboration.

On the other hand, I don't think I wouldn't have been able to spend that time with the most precious people in my life and have this job if not for a tenure clock delay.
posted by lab.beetle at 10:31 AM on June 28, 2016 [9 favorites]


Also, speaking as a man who left the workforce for four months to care for an infant: why would you create a policy intended to address the gender gap that having kids exacerbates, and then apply it equally to both male and female faculty? You're economists at prestigious research institutions, for chrissake... did no one sit down with a pencil and try to sketch this out?
posted by Mayor West at 10:46 AM on June 28, 2016 [12 favorites]


maternity leave and paternity leave are not the same thing, at all

They can be--but it sure as hell seems as though men have more of a choice in what "paternity leave" means for them. I had a coworker who used his 12 weeks of FMLA to wrap up his dissertation and finish his PhD. I don't necessarily think he did anything wrong--at my company, they almost certainly would have approved 12 weeks of unpaid leave for personal reasons rather than FMLA after the birth of a child--but for some reason it felt a bit like taking advantage of a loophole when he told me about it.

On the other hand, my husband took a full 12 weeks of paternity leave, but staggered it so it started after I went back to work. He was the primary caregiver of our infant and other than feeding breastmilk from bottles rather than the source, his leave looked awfully similar to mine, and the potential career penalty was probably extremely similar. (We both work for good companies so it was a small penalty, but it's inescapable that coworkers look at you a bit differently after you go out on an extended parental leave.) One nice thing that his company has done is to offer a certain amount of paid paternity leave to all fathers, but twice as much only to men who promise that they are the sole and primary caregiver to their infant during leave. So men who just want to take a few weeks off with their wives and bond with the baby in the early days can do that, but men who want to take a leave that is much more comparable to traditional maternity leave get the same amount of paid leave as women get. (Women don't have to certify or promise they're the sole caregiver to take the full maternity leave, but then again I've never heard of a woman taking maternity leave and getting a nanny so they can moonlight/finish a PhD/write a book.)

Seems like a similar mechanism could work in academia: just make stopping the tenure clock contingent upon the man pledging that he's taking at least X weeks (40? 45? out of 52) to be the sole caregiver of their child.
posted by iminurmefi at 10:46 AM on June 28, 2016 [2 favorites]


I wonder if there's any relevance to the fact that they only studied economics departments, which seem to me to be male-heavy with decision makers
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 10:48 AM on June 28, 2016 [4 favorites]


Eh, I don't think that economics departments are outliers wrt to being male-heavy. I'd be unsurprised to see something similar in biology or STEM generally.
posted by hydrobatidae at 10:53 AM on June 28, 2016 [10 favorites]


why would you create a policy intended to address the gender gap that having kids exacerbates, and then apply it equally to both male and female faculty?

I think it was/is applied equally because to apply it only to women would be, on the face of it, unfair to men.

(and the lawsuits that would be titled "but what about the men??")
posted by Dashy at 10:55 AM on June 28, 2016 [1 favorite]


...and economics departments are more likely to be mostly people who think that taking full, perverse advantage of the unintended consequences of incentive systems is not only A-Okay but PHILOSOPHICALLY REQUIRED!
posted by radicalawyer at 10:56 AM on June 28, 2016 [20 favorites]


It's interesting that this is considered a bombshell, because it's definitely something that I've heard rumblings about from former grad-school colleagues. It's important to have evidence, but I think that a lot of people have long suspected that family-friendly policies help women raise families and help men write more articles/ finish books.

I'm not sure exactly how to fix it, though.
I think it was/is applied equally because to apply it only to women would be, on the face of it, unfair to men.
It would also codify the expectation that women do the bulk of childcare, which is not something that I think you want to build into the system. Plus, not all parents are straight couples.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 10:58 AM on June 28, 2016 [3 favorites]


The last paragraph is interesting - men who take the timeout are more likely to get tenure, but they end up earning less than men who don't. I wonder what bit of sociological weirdness causes that to happen?
posted by clawsoon at 11:00 AM on June 28, 2016


why would you create a policy intended to address the gender gap that having kids exacerbates, and then apply it equally to both male and female faculty?

My guess: an attempt to get out in front of any hiring bias for tenure track positions. If both genders get to do the thing, there's theoretically less of a chance a female candidate will get passed over because someone on the hiring committee is an asshole about the very notion of clock-stopping options. Don't know of that's the rationale here but that's usually what is floated as a solution to private sector "but if we give (only) women maternity leave, companies will stop hiring women" complaints.
posted by soren_lorensen at 11:01 AM on June 28, 2016 [1 favorite]


The Handmaid's Tenure
posted by rhizome at 11:13 AM on June 28, 2016 [3 favorites]


I'm not trying to be difficult, but what's the alternative to giving this option equally to both genders? iminurmefi says that their husband was asked to promise that they'd be the primary caregiver (which seems appropriate), but if there's actual "means-testing" (or whatever you'd call it) then there's a chance (with even a very low bar) that you'd drive away men who would otherwise be primary caregivers on paternity leave, which is a negative outcome for all concerned.
posted by TypographicalError at 11:16 AM on June 28, 2016 [1 favorite]


The problem lies not with the universities, but with the professors taking this leave. Women are using it to recover and raise children. Men are using it to write books.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 11:18 AM on June 28, 2016 [6 favorites]


Whatever you do do NOT read the comments. They're entirely predictable.
posted by asavage at 11:23 AM on June 28, 2016 [1 favorite]


This has also been covered in the NYT, with what I think is a great take away: "It leaves me wondering how many other policy mistakes we could avoid, if only we had more female economists."
posted by lab.beetle at 11:26 AM on June 28, 2016 [10 favorites]


what's the alternative to giving this option equally to both genders?
Smashing the patriarchy?

But seriously, don't know. Don't let people submit articles/books/grants while on family leave? Don't reward people for publishing while on leave? Take away keys to the office and make you turn in your laptop for the duration? None of this will stop it, just make it harder, for people to take advantage of the system.
posted by sockermom at 11:29 AM on June 28, 2016 [3 favorites]


The clock stopping concept applied equally to both sexes is exactly what our society needs. The fault is in individuals taking unfair advantage of the situation in a way that a patriarchal society allows. It's unfair to the actual caretaker of a child, be it a woman or a man, it's just usually a woman because our society says it should be.
posted by Foam Pants at 11:36 AM on June 28, 2016 [4 favorites]


I think part of the reason to offer tenure-stoppage to everyone (and some places may even require it) is that otherwise women who take stoppage get dinged. I recall reading a study that if both genders had the choice but not requirement to take it, then few men took it, and women were under pressure not to/got dinged if they did.

Of course here it looks like the women are getting dinged if they take the leave anyhow. I don't have a solution here.

I can say that as a woman academic interviewing for tenure track positions, currently in my thirties, I've been advised specifically *not* to ask the committee about tenure stoppage. (I don't ask, but I do listen if the info is offered; if it really mattered for me I'd ask the dean, who supposedly doesn't have influence on the committee). I sort of wonder if men who asked wouldn't be dinged in the same way..
posted by nat at 11:37 AM on June 28, 2016 [1 favorite]


What if, instead of automatically rolling back everyone's tenure clock by a year, an institution could let parents of any gender apply for a rollback the year before tenure review, with documentation of substantial time given to childrearing the primary consideration?
posted by daisystomper at 11:47 AM on June 28, 2016 [3 favorites]


I think that the old dudes who are in charge of departments would look at the evidence that women spend a very substantial part of their time on childcare and household management and would decide that this was evidence that those women weren't serious about their careers. I don't think you should start from the assumption that the people calling the shots have any investment in the career advancement of people who devote a lot of time to parenting.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 11:52 AM on June 28, 2016 [5 favorites]


I didn't know what the heck a tenure clock was so I googled it, and I don't understand why you would want to stop it. Wouldn't it essentially shorten the time you're on probation?
posted by AFABulous at 12:10 PM on June 28, 2016


This reminds me of the time my grad school advisor told me I didn't get enough done while I was on medical leave (even though I had to sign a contract stipulating that I would do no work in order to get said leave and had my library and network privileges suspended).
posted by srboisvert at 12:12 PM on June 28, 2016 [4 favorites]


AFABulous - Going up for tenure requires that you have completed some approximate amount of scholarly work that varies by department and discipline. If you don't stop the clock, you have less time to complete that work and are at a disadvantage compared to other that had the full amount of time to complete the work. You want your full probationary people so that you can maximize your scholarly output.
posted by anthropophagous at 12:13 PM on June 28, 2016 [4 favorites]


I didn't know what the heck a tenure clock was so I googled it, and I don't understand why you would want to stop it.

It gives you more time to build up the body of work that will be evaluated as part of the tenure decision. You only have one shot at tenure; if the decision is negative, you're out of a job.
posted by mr_roboto at 12:15 PM on June 28, 2016


You restart the clock when your year is over, so instead of considering scholarly output over 6 years, you would consider it over 7.
posted by ChuraChura at 1:09 PM on June 28, 2016


"There are relatively few women hired at each university during the sample period. On average, only four female assistant professors were hired at each university between 1985 and 2004, compared to 17 male assistant professors” (p. 17). That was a stop-right-there moment for me: if you are an economics department worried about gender equality, maybe instead of rethinking tenure extensions you should be looking at your damn hiring practices. But as far as the present study goes, there are n = 62 women at institutions that never adopted gender-neutral tenure extension policies, and n = 129 at institutions that did. (It’s even worse than that because only a fraction of them are relevant for estimating the policy effect; more on that below). With a small sample there is going to be a lot of uncertainty in the estimates under the best of conditions. And it’s not the best of conditions: Within the comparison group (the departments that never adopted a tenure extension policy), there are big, differential changes in men’s and women’s tenure rates over the study period (1985 to 2004): Over time, men’s tenure rate drops by about 25%, and women’s tenure rate doubles from 12% to 25%. Any observed effect of a department adopting a tenure-extension policy is going to have to be estimated in comparison to that noisy, moving target.
posted by ChuraChura at 1:35 PM on June 28, 2016 [7 favorites]


This situation is depressing yet unsurprising, and I can't think of a good fix....so I'm going to suggest a radical one: abolish tenure?
posted by Existential Dread at 1:38 PM on June 28, 2016


I am surprised by the magnitude of this effect, but the fact that more leave doesn't help women isn't a complete shock to me. If a woman absolutely has to be at the office or she'll lose her job, she and her partner are likely to accept that and do what they have to to make that happen. If it's looser ("I should really try to get some work done while I'm on leave", "I should read up on the latest technologies/research to stay current") the housework and childcare are likely to expand to take up all the time she would be spending on her career. Even if her partner is supportive, women are socialized in such a way that it can be hard to say "no, I'm not doing this laundry or cleaning or cooking or caretaking right now, I'm focusing on work." I'm not saying that get-back-in-the-office-or-you're-fired is the answer, but I can see how it could lead to more equal outcomes.

I also have concerns about long maternity leaves and work-from-home arrangements for this reason.
posted by Ralston McTodd at 2:03 PM on June 28, 2016 [1 favorite]


How would abolishing tenure make this better?

Mostly by removing a systemic advantage given to privileged candidates and those who don't need to take medical/parental/other leave. Academia has devised a tiered structure of privilege: tenured > non-tenured but tenure track > non-tenure track > adjunct. Competition for grants has intensified substantially, with money favoring those with more privilege, advantages, and track record. If you have money and are a known quantity to the program managers, you're much more likely to get more money.

Removing the tenure track will do much to level the playing field for everyone except adjuncts.
posted by Existential Dread at 2:08 PM on June 28, 2016 [5 favorites]


it can be hard to say "no, I'm not doing this laundry or cleaning or cooking or caretaking right now, I'm focusing on work."

Actually, I think it's partly that some people (many of whom are men) who do say "no" do not see, in the moment of deciding to pick up the socks or think about the shopping list or hold and sing to a baby, how great is the impact of these actions.

There has been a lot of discussion about the costs of emotional labor; what might help is making explicit the incredible leveraged benefits of emotional labor, and the huge costs of not doing emotional labor. One small action can affect quality of life, health, and other costs in huge ways -- but I don't think this has been measured. Optimizing the relationship with one's children is something that will give benefits over the course of tens of thousands of future interactions, and maintaining order and cleanliness, aside from various health and safety benefits, means that countless small actions are made greatly easier, faster, and more pleasant.

When you combine the amorphousness of these very real benefits with the temporal discounting and other behavioral tendencies, it's understandable that stuff just doesn't get done.
posted by amtho at 2:22 PM on June 28, 2016


Am I correct in thinking that this work hasn't been peer reviewed yet?

"IZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion.
Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character."

The blog post that ChuraChura links to points out some curious methodological issues and strange quirks in the data....
posted by mr_roboto at 2:26 PM on June 28, 2016


Removing the tenure track will do much to level the playing field for everyone except adjuncts.

Now, now. Don't forget the administrators! I do believe I see them nodding in vigorous approval of your proposal. I wonder why...?
posted by mylittlepoppet at 2:28 PM on June 28, 2016 [2 favorites]


In the absence of tenure, institutions would have regular review periods to determine if a faculty member is deserving of continued employment. And the same criteria will be used (publications, grants, teaching performance, service).

Much like any other career path; I'm staring down the barrel of my annual review myself as non-faculty academic staff. The difference, I suppose, is the sheer amount of competition for the vanishingly few tenure-track positions out there in the world. One interesting aspect of my solution is that the people doing the review would no longer be tenured themselves. And at my institution, there is a non-tenure track "Research Associate Professor" position that is largely governed by one's ability to get research funding, rather than some harrumphing panel of senior faculty scrutinizing your accomplishments with a magnifying glass.

Other career paths have done a much better job of retaining and promoting women. Academia can't seem to manage the same thing; it's been the subject of exhaustive study, and yet we seem to be no closer to a real solution.
posted by Existential Dread at 2:43 PM on June 28, 2016 [2 favorites]


There are a lot of ways in which tenure is problematic, and I also hear a lot of people arguing for its abolishment (not just in this thread, but in my daily life). No. Tenure is necessary for true scientific work. Science needs to be able to challenge assumptions and norms, sometimes in ways that can seem radical, problematic, or perhaps even frightening. This is necessary. Tenure allows researchers to ask controversial questions without putting their livelihood on the line. There's a reason that the neoliberalist shift in the academy and its accompanying rumblings of abolishing tenure frightens faculty, and it's not because we're afraid we'll lose our individual jobs. It's because we're afraid of what it will do to the pursuit of knowledge wholesale. True scientists realize that science is about the science, not the person doing the science.
posted by sockermom at 2:48 PM on June 28, 2016 [12 favorites]


Tenure allows researchers to ask controversial questions without putting their livelihood on the line.

I understand that this is the idea behind tenure, but is this the reality? I spent some time in academia (organic chemistry) and I still follow the field, what with its being my job. There, I certainly don't see anyone asking controversial questions that would otherwise put their jobs at stake, or doing long-term studies that require years of effort without short-term results. Don't get me wrong: I see interesting work, and I'm sure most professors believe in some vague way in the general importance of the pursuit of knowledge, but I find it hard to believe that tenure makes a big difference -- once it's attained, anyway. From what I can tell, the actual function of tenure is to put in place a formal, high-stakes performance review; like a PhD qualifying examination but on steroids.
posted by Peter J. Prufrock at 3:21 PM on June 28, 2016 [6 favorites]


I'm also a chemist by training, and I haven't really observed tenure protecting anyone's job; I'm sure that might be different in other fields. My proposal is admittedly radical, and I'm quite happy to be wrong, but it seems evident that tenure needs to be drastically reformed. At present it seems mostly to protect the status of the privileged. Ruffle the wrong feathers and you'll still be forced out, tenure or no.
posted by Existential Dread at 4:16 PM on June 28, 2016 [1 favorite]


This just feels like a variation on that Boston professor who took a year of paternity leave to navel gaze (previously).
posted by the agents of KAOS at 4:43 PM on June 28, 2016


What's even worse about this is that it sets up a precedent where someone, looking at a male candidate and female candidate respectively who each took the same amount of leave, and the male one has extra articles and work done because he spent his leave doing work, and the female one doesn't, because she spent her leave taking care of a baby and healing from childbirth. So then it's like, "Well, you had this extra time and you still didn't get enough work done, why not? He did." Well, one person endured a major medical event with ongoing side effects (like, say, lactation) and the other one didn't.

It perpetuates the problem, it doesn't solve it at all. Not unless there's a requirement for men who take paternity leave to prove that they were caregiving, and not just using it as a sabbatical.
posted by Autumnheart at 5:34 PM on June 28, 2016 [5 favorites]


Removing the tenure track will do much to level the playing field

Get rid of tenure and you will have a level field alright. A level rec league playing field.

Also do you have any idea how valuable it is to have economists tied up in academia? If you chase them out by lowering their effective compensation you will unleash another hoard of innovative financiers on the world.
posted by srboisvert at 5:35 PM on June 28, 2016 [8 favorites]


Why not restructure academia so you have teachers and academics? I get that there's a benefit to having a professor who's a practicing expert in her field, but you can still get the benefit by having the expert write the curriculum. I don't see why there needs to continue to be a "teacher must publish or they don't get tenure" requirement. Certainly a great academic can be a lousy teacher. And vice versa--maybe a great teacher doesn't really want to publish.
posted by Autumnheart at 5:38 PM on June 28, 2016


I'm an assistant professor, and I will never forget being cornered in the hallway by another assistant prof - a man - who told me excitedly that I should really consider having a baby soon, because it would stop my clock and when his wife had a baby, he wrote a book while on paternity leave. I could write a book too, on maternity leave! Leaving aside the extreme sociopathy that is having a child to stop your tenure clock, maternity leave and paternity leave are not the same thing, at all.

I once met up with a friend who'd gone to a training session for new faculty in biology (he was about to take a position elsewhere), where a male faculty member literally gave this same advice to a room full of people. I actually had rotated in that guy's lab, though not right when his kids were born: he was physically in lab from 9 am until 11 pm daily, with a couple of hours' break to go home for dinner. Meanwhile, elsewhere in my department, a pre-tenure female faculty member had had two children, both of whom IIRC had rare and serious developmental disabilities and required tons of extra care. I wonder if she felt like she was working the freaking system by getting a mere two years back.
posted by en forme de poire at 7:04 PM on June 28, 2016 [2 favorites]


Dear people who don't see the benefits of tenure in your particular departments,

Please learn a lot more about this before advocating, even in casual speech, the abandonment of something that has been difficult to maintain and might provide some real benefit to the world. Please learn about the Dunning-Kruger effect. Although you know you're just spitballing ideas, the fact that you are in academia might seem to give more weight to your words than you intend.
posted by amtho at 7:04 PM on June 28, 2016 [4 favorites]


Also, if tenure isn't providing the protections it should, maybe that ought to be addressed. Improve the facts to match the intent; don't abandon the intent.
posted by amtho at 7:08 PM on June 28, 2016 [2 favorites]


> The problem lies not with the universities, but with the professors taking this leave. Women are using it to recover and raise children. Men are using it to write books.

> The fault is in individuals taking unfair advantage of the situation in a way that a patriarchal society allows.

If the point of the policy is to help ameliorate gender inequality and it actually causes or enables it, that's a failure of policy, not of individuals.
posted by en forme de poire at 7:13 PM on June 28, 2016 [1 favorite]


It's true that traffic laws alone don't prevent speed-related accidents. If you only have some people following the laws and others running drag races around them, there might even be more accidents than without the laws. In fact, a system of some people going the speed limit and others racing around them might lead to all kinds of problems, and resentment between the speeders and the non-speeders, too.

That doesn't mean that traffic laws are a failure and should be discarded. It just means that making things work better for everyone might not be simple. That's OK. Non-simple systems are good too.
posted by amtho at 7:58 PM on June 28, 2016


If a policy (or traffic law) cannot be applied equitably, it's reasonable to ask whether that policy is serving it's intended purpose. If you think the policy has benefits that outweigh the costs, make the case for it. But don't argue from authority by coyly invoking Dunning-Kruger. Make the case for keeping the policy, and make the case for reforming it.
posted by Existential Dread at 9:42 PM on June 28, 2016


I'm not qualified to discuss the pros and cons of tenure.
posted by amtho at 10:05 PM on June 28, 2016


We basically don't have tenure any more in Australia. Almost all new academic appointments that aren't adjunct teaching/short term teaching, are on 3-5 year contracts. And yes, it works exactly as speculated above. Whether your contract gets extended or renewed, or whether you get the next job, or whether you get promoted all depends on the exact same things that determine tenure elsewhere. Maternity/paternity leave is supposedly taken into account when assessing productivity (and it usually extends the contract end date), but I'm sure similar effects for men/women as those discussed here apply in these circumstances too.

And please don't suggest a new divide between teaching and research staff. We have tried that here too and it leads to terrible inequalities because teaching just isn't valued as much. So the people employed to primarily engage in teaching are not valued as much. They get fewer resources, less administrative support, worse offices, shorter contracts, and end up working longer hours than the research-only academics. Also, at the university I worked in that had two departments for just about all the disciplines - a teaching department and a research department - the teaching dept was full of women (with those worse support/resources/etc) and the research dept was full of men. In every discipline.
posted by lollusc at 11:47 PM on June 28, 2016 [9 favorites]


Hello all,

I thought you'd be interested in this rebuttal blog post by Sanjay Srivastava, which examines the data and finds much of it poorly interpreted or inconclusive --

https://hardsci.wordpress.com/2016/06/28/dont-change-your-family-friendly-tenure-extension-policy-just-yet/

A good quote:

"""
Consider this: “There are relatively few women hired at each university during the sample period. On average, only four female assistant professors were hired at each university between 1985 and 2004, compared to 17 male assistant professors” (p. 17). That was a stop-right-there moment for me: if you are an economics department worried about gender equality, maybe instead of rethinking tenure extensions you should be looking at your damn hiring practices.
"""
posted by ctitusbrown at 6:01 AM on June 29, 2016 [1 favorite]


Wait, why is there a clock?
posted by nickzoic at 6:57 PM on June 29, 2016


Wait, why is there a clock?

US academic careers 101:

Short version: Professors are hired on probation, usually for two three-year terms. If you don't pass muster at the end of the first term, you're out, but this is not a high bar to clear. Just not being obviously subpar is generally enough.

If you don't pass muster at the end of the second term, you're also out, but the bar here is typically quite high. This is absolutely not a "don't fuck up" standard. You have N years, typically realistically five because you're considered during that sixth year, to produce a body of work that other people in your field think marks you as a solid and serious scholar relative to the kind of school you're employed at. People at big research universities are expected to produce more and better work, and are evaluated by (and have to impress) big-name people from other big research universities, but you can reasonably expect that your tenure standard will be hard to reach given the resources and time available to you. Standards and practices vary but basically you need near-unanimous enthusiastic support from everyone who agreed to read and evaluate your work, and you need to have only a relative few people who were asked not agree to do so, since an abundance of declines will be viewed as people who have nothing good to say about your work.

If you clear both hurdles, you have tenure, which is the same scale of job protection as basic civil service protections; you can still be fired, but they have to show a good reason to do so. There is a clock because any probationary period must end. What we are talking about here are policies that allow you to set the clock back a year if you've had a child (or other serious life-changing events), so that you have N+1 years to assemble that record to impress people instead of N years. Or, more realistically, so that you have N effective years instead of N-1 years because you lost a year to your kid or whatever.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 7:39 PM on June 29, 2016 [4 favorites]


You have a certain amount of time, standardized by university and discipline, in which to prove your department that you are productive enough, a successful enough teacher, and committed enough to departmental and university service, to be worthy of hiring permanently (getting tenure). At the school where I'm a grad student, that's 6 years, but you can "stop the clock" for a year if you have or adopt a kid, because ostensibly that will have a negative impact on your productivity, teaching, and service, and it wouldn't be fair to hold someone who has just given birth and has newborn to the same standard as someone with no kids.
posted by ChuraChura at 7:41 PM on June 29, 2016 [1 favorite]


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