next »

[finallyfullprof]

I am amazed that anyone even gets away with asking personal questions, even in side conversations. Maybe it's because my school has been sued so many times, but those of us who go through the EEOC briefing are told in no uncertain terms that we are not to ask anything whatsoever about familial status, race/ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation. If a person brings it up in the interview, we are not to respond to it in any way or make any sort of note that it occurred. 

[bacardiandlime]

That sounds reasonable. That litigiousness creates weird situations is unfortunate, but such a system that you have described at least maintains an even playing field for candidates (no benefit presumably coming the way of the candidate who whips out a wallet full of kiddie photos - though this benefit seems to go only to men...)
In the article, the person who asked the question was not a member of the SC, and presumably this civilian didn't even know she was crossing any imaginary line by asking the same kind of question that you might ask anyone at a cocktail party.
However, other posters in the past have mentioned being asked such questions by non-SC members when it is not inadvertant or innocent, I recall one (can't find it now though) where, during a socialising event in a campus visit, the wife of a faculty member said straight to the candidate something like:'They're not allowed to ask you, but I can. Are you married?'

I completely understand schools being edgy about legal action, but it is not illegal to ask if someone is married, still less is it illegal for a candidate to answer (which is precisely why the 'I can't answer that question' thing strikes me as so weird). What's illegal is if the school allows the answer to such a question to influence hiring.

In academic hiring, where 'fit' and 'collegiality' make up so much of a hiring choice (far, far more it seems to me than in the corporate world), these elements of personality (and personal circumstances) come into play in a much bigger way, for good and bad. I know of someone who got the job because she mentioned she played a particular sport: there was an interdepartmental league and the head of her department wanted someone else to join the team. Were other candidates discriminated against? Clearly something non-job specific swayed the SC's decision. But if you believe in the Malcolm Gladwell approach, they've decided whether to hire you in the first split second. Whether you've got kids won't matter.

[fiona]

Those personal questions are NOT innocent. They are judgments, and judging whether someone "fits" can cover many things that are not academic, such as race, sexual orientation, and religion. Looks, too. I know one history dept. in which all the women hired look alike.

We do not have the moral right (or the legal one) to choose someone because they're like us in race, sex, or the other qualities.

If we did, the workplace would still be overwhelmingly white male, as was my graduate  school department (all white, all male, always had been).

What's mind-boggling is that it's been known for 30 years that such questions are discriminatory. How come some people still haven't gotten the message?

The Fiona

[dr_dre]

To my mind, this site serves two overlapping communities.

Group A: Jobseekers and junior faculty. Mostly we have to suck it up, whatever it is.

Group B: Senior faculty, deans, whatnot. These folks can shape policy and make decisions.

So if I post about Injustice X, I can expect Group B to wax poetic, post quotes from Great Activists, and debate the fairness of it. Maybe Group B will reach new conclusions and enlighten each other and improve the world. Maybe not. Group A can also chime in, but at the end of the day, we all know we pretty much have to suck it up. So we have a very "Ms. Mentor" tone to much of the site, for better or worse.

In an ideal world, everything would be fair. Everyone would obviously hire the most qualified applicant for the job, regardless of race, religion, nationality, sexual orientation, size, etc. And I would get to eat Ben & Jerry's for lunch every day.

[fiona]

To my mind, this site serves two overlapping communities.

Group A: Jobseekers and junior faculty. Mostly we have to suck it up, whatever it is.

Group B: Senior faculty, deans, whatnot. These folks can shape policy and make decisions.

So if I post about Injustice X, I can expect Group B to wax poetic, post quotes from Great Activists, and debate the fairness of it. Maybe Group B will reach new conclusions and enlighten each other and improve the world. Maybe not. Group A can also chime in, but at the end of the day, we all know we pretty much have to suck it up. So we have a very "Ms. Mentor" tone to much of the site, for better or worse.

In an ideal world, everything would be fair. Everyone would obviously hire the most qualified applicant for the job, regardless of race, religion, nationality, sexual orientation, size, etc. And I would get to eat Ben & Jerry's for lunch every day.

As a fogey, I'm in your Group B, but I think Group B has a responsibility to speak up and not let Group A be dumped upon. Illegal or unprofessional questions are dumpings on Group A. Yes, they often have to suck it up, but so do fairly powerless people in any job (such as associates in law firms).

But senior people, including some of the first posters on this thread, ought to know what's going on and ought to speak up. Ms. Mentor says that. Part of mentoring is defending those who are less powerful. The woman who said "Cats" in the original article was trying, in an awkward way, to do that. 

The Fiona

[dr_dre]

Yes, I thought the "cats" person sounded like a sympathetic colleague.

[terpsichore]

What's mind-boggling is that it's been known for 30 years that such questions are discriminatory. How come some people still haven't gotten the message?

The Fiona

Perhaps they don't want to hear the message, or don't care about the discriminatory impact of such questions.

[terpsichore]

I recognize a problem.  I'm not asking for a lecture, or for anybody to testify. I'm asking for specific suggestions/solutions, regarding what our department can do to remedy the situation. We specifically target women, people of color, and other "minorities" in our job advertisements. We have very reasonable standards for tenure.  We have campus daycare.  We encourage spousal hires.  We accommodate requests for extended time for tenure and we even have some faculty on part-time tenure track positions to accommodate various lifestyle and family situations. Still, we have a faculty male/female imbalance that has not improved in at least 10 years. 

I know someone, a tenured, female science professor, who realized a similar situation was going on at her institution.  Despite honest attempts (as opposed to pro forma attempts) to shortlist women, senior women having influence over the search process, and so on, women just were not getting hired in the sciences.  She now has a sort of checklist of active steps that institutions and people need to take, which I can't reconstruct to type in right now.  A lot of them involve actively monitoring oneself and others for the kind of creeping bias that discounts women's research activity (attributing a greater share of their achievements to collaborators/mentors, etc), evaluating candidates' personality on criteria that tend to favor men (self-confidence in presentation to the point of egotism, and so on). 

I would add:

Ask candidates to describe their contributions to their research, and to describe the contributions of their collaborators/mentors. Early career women may need to be trained in how to explain their accomplishments to a search committee.

Keep an eye out for subtle differences in wording in letters of recommendation that tend to downplay the qualifications and the accomplishments of women candidates.

[doctor_torrseal]

What's mind-boggling is that it's been known for 30 years that such questions are discriminatory. How come some people still haven't gotten the message?

The Fiona

Perhaps they don't want to hear the message, or don't care about the discriminatory impact of such questions.

Both of those happen.  I have a third alternative, which isn't much of an improvement.  I think the questioners may think of themselves as non discriminators, and thus not realize the discriminatory impact of the questions, or that it is affecting their judgment.  My earlier anecdote about a colleague who discovered that her institution wasn't hiring any women (in the sciences) even though it was supposedly trying and she herself was on the relevant committees was intended to illustrate the unconscious-discrimination problem.

Speaking about my little corner of the sciences, I feel that bias has largely changed from hard discrimination ("Women can't do physics") to soft discrimination: women get more service tasks, more of their accomplishments are attributed to their mentors, they are either not taken seriously because not aggressive enough or downgraded for being "pushy," and so on.  I believe that some or many of the people who do this don't realize the serious extent to which it is clouding their judgments.  If you asked whether they believed that women were inferior scientists they would say no.  So when they ask these questions, they think it's innocent, but then the answers influence them because they have not engaged in critical self-questioning about their decision-making.

This may be optimistic.  I may not be privy to the details of what the old fogies are saying behind closed doors on hiring committees.  I guess I'm just talking about how attitudes can persist even beyond the old fogey contingent.  The depressing part about this is that waiting for the old fogies to die off is proving to not be a cure.

[bacardiandlime]

Keep an eye out for subtle differences in wording in letters of recommendation that tend to downplay the qualifications and the accomplishments of women candidates.

Yes. I don't think this is limited to the sciences at all. A senior academic in an MLA field once mentioned to me the gendered nature of recommendation letters. Men are described as 'brilliant' whereas women get the far more ambivalent 'clever'...
And I don't think it's conscious on the part of recommenders either.