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[castafiore]

OK, I am sure there are more possible options out there but I'm curious to know whether forumites' situations map on to my assumption that women are more likely to 'trail' for various reasons. Feel free to add more nuance in the comments!

[informal]

We really won't know until we actually go on the job market together and see if there's any dept out there that wants one of us badly enough to find a spot for the other. If one of us leaves academia, though, it will be me (female), because he is in a field with no (or extremely limited) non-academic opportunities and I have plenty of other options. Besides which, he is several years ahead of me on the career track, so we would do better to keep his salary than mine if total unemployment becomes an issue.

ETA: While the reasoning for me leaving academia isn't just that I'm a woman, I should note that he is in a very male-dominated field while I am in a fairly evenly-split field (woman-dominated at the grad level, but evenly split in professorships, as these things tend to go). No clue if that contributes to the in/out of academia opportunity difference or not.

[justanotherucprof]

Perhaps because of traditional age patterns (woman more likely to be younger in opposite sex couples), we see more women as trailing partners, often not yet done with grad school while husband is searching.

[cranefly]

Why would you assume that?

[embitteredhistorian]

I am very interested to see the results of this. Hopefully more people will respond.

[justanotherucprof]

Perhaps because of traditional age patterns (woman more likely to be younger in opposite sex couples), we see more women as trailing partners, often not yet done with grad school while husband is searching.

I should add that at the senior level (rarer for us), our experience is that the ratio is roughly balanced.

[ucprof]

I don't quite get the conditions of the poll because there are "he quit academe" and "she quit academe"
as options in the poll.  However it is possible to have a trailing spouse who is not an academic yet has a professional career with similarly difficult issues with regard to finding a good job in a good location.  I have a trailing spouse
who is not an academic, never was so the question is which box to choose? 

[capper]

I voted that my husband is the trailing spouse, but hopefully that is changing.  He accepted a non-TT position when I got my TT job.  We've now been here 5 years; I'm tenured and he's still NTT.  However, after one more year his position will transition to half-time TT, and hopefully eventually to full time (he's transitioning into a retirement position).  So although he is probably the trailing spouse, we also hit the jackpot.

[tenured_feminist]

Not quite sure how to vote. Mr. T_F finally has a full-time, good university job after ten years of trailing, but it's administrative. Is he still in academia? Well, sort of . . .

We had to threaten (credibly) to move twice and follow through on the threat once for this to happen.

Many disciplines have some data on this question, as does the national survey of earned doctorates.

[castafiore]

Yikes, it's my first poll and I clearly am not a quantitative researcher and don't know how to construct the options quite right! I added "other" as a sixth choice. I don't know how to answer it myself - partner and I have two TT jobs in very distant locales so as yet no one is trailing, but we hope that one of us will be, soon.

I assume women are more likely to trail because of age differences as was mentioned above - but I also know cases where this is not so. Every case is so individual - it's hard to even speak of 'trailing' in many of them. I guess trailing is relative - depending on what your expectations were.

[totoro]

I quit a tenured job in the US so my wife could get a job here in Australia straight out of her US PhD. By moving to Aus we could actually get to live together and she could get a job due to both out visa restrictions. First I quit academia. When that didn't work out I got a one year research position and now am looking for a long-term position here. So I'm trailing though I am senior in academic terms and we aren't at the same institution though in the same city... Life is complicated I guess.

[tenured_feminist]

One thing confounding your assumptions, Castafiore, is that women are more likely than men to partner with people who hold equivalent or higher terminal degrees. Thus, a straight woman is more likely than a straight man to have a partner who holds a Ph.D.

This could have two implications. If most Ph.D. - Ph.D. relationships are forged in graduate school, in many disciplines it's a crap shoot who gets the job. Yet men overall are more likely to have female partners who aren't candidates for tenure-stream jobs. However, if a substantial proportion of these relationships involve a more junior woman hooking up with a more senior man, then the woman will in most of these cases be the trailer. I'm guessing that the senior woman-junior man pairing, at least at the time the relationship is formed, is the smallest proportion of the three possibilities. Mr. T_F and I got together in grad school.

I've also heard that many universities find it more painful to contemplate a man without a job than a woman without a job (and thus are more willing to bend), but this is highly anecdotal. It surely has not been my experience.

[embitteredhistorian]

One thing confounding your assumptions, Castafiore, is that women are more likely than men to partner with people who hold equivalent or higher terminal degrees. Thus, a straight woman is more likely than a straight man to have a partner who holds a Ph.D.

This could have two implications. If most Ph.D. - Ph.D. relationships are forged in graduate school, in many disciplines it's a crap shoot who gets the job. Yet men overall are more likely to have female partners who aren't candidates for tenure-stream jobs. However, if a substantial proportion of these relationships involve a more junior woman hooking up with a more senior man, then the woman will in most of these cases be the trailer. I'm guessing that the senior woman-junior man pairing, at least at the time the relationship is formed, is the smallest proportion of the three possibilities. Mr. T_F and I got together in grad school.

I've also heard that many universities find it more painful to contemplate a man without a job than a woman without a job (and thus are more willing to bend), but this is highly anecdotal. It surely has not been my experience.

That hasn't been my experience either, but I can see how it would happen.

Why is it more likely for men to have female partners who aren't candidates for TT jobs instead of vice versa (if I'm understanding correctly)?

[knitknat]

I once heard the statistic that 50% of heterosexual, female PhDs are married to a PhD. Not sure if it's true, but it sure feels that way. I would imagine the statistic for hetero, male PhDs is likely 20% at the very most, based on my completely unscientific observations.

I am older than my husband by a couple of years, but he blazed through grad school and I took detours. Now I am trailing spouse. This will likely continue because he isn't cut out for much besides academia, while I have a long history of government and industry employment (with regular job offers to return to those sectors). The family thing will likely also factor in (we're just starting out) - it's much easier for him to be TT than me during the baby years.

[totoro]

There are more men with PhD's overall presumably and so more women married to PhDs than vice versa. Otherwise these numbers won't work. OTOH the ratios can't be as extreme as being cited here for recent PhDs because I don't think the gender balance in receiving PhDs is that skewed any more.