just out of interest, what sort of publication record would you expect succesful candidates to possess?

I’m not an economist but I am interested in the sort of record UQ economics would desire ;)

And I do not know how much of that is perception (you must not be serious about your career if you have two kids—something which can only be disproved by being a publishing superstar) or the actual demands of mothering. Or a combination of both.

This isn’t too late for many women. But there is a higher risk that either you won’t conceive or you will have miscarriages. I always find it a bit strange that this cost of tenure for women is so comfortably accepted by many academics. It is interesting to compare women in medicine and other fields, such as law. Most women doctors have children whereas the number of women academics who have children is much smaller. Some women manage to have one or more children though and still get tenure and others get lucky after tenure and can still conceive. (The received wisdom is that it is very risky for tenure to have more than one.) Some people want to adopt, and adoption agencies leave open a bigger window for age. There is a cut off age for some international adoptions but I don’t know about domestic.

I can’t think of a reason why women academics would be very different than women doctors in their desire to reproduce. So I think that more than a few women are sacrificing being parents to get tenure. Being a woman who wants children and tenure at the same time is a true dilemma because you are running big risks in both directions: You might not have children and not get tenure, for example. Or you might wait and then be unable to have children. Statistics about women in other professions suggest it is probably the tenure system rather than the standard problem of being in a demanding career.

I spent hundreds of dollars, and dozens of hours, mailing packages of various sorts to various places. No doubt most of those places never looked at all of the documents I sent them. Now, having been on the other side, I see how overworked our staff is when dealing with similar piles of documents from applicants. Quite frankly I find the whole system absurd.

All of us are constantly emailing PDFs back and forth with very little problem. We upload pictures onto FaceSpace and its ilk. Why, then, do we still insist on burdening applicants and assistants with carbon-footprint-expanding slices of dead tree every year?

This wouldn’t fix the larger problems of the academic job market, but it could go some way towards minimizing the absurdities of one part of the process. Were I designing this database I think I’d also devote considerable server-power to the establishment of virtual interview rooms, where applicants and SCs could then conduct video-conferences in lieu of these soul-crushing conference cattle-calls. This would be much more fair economically to the applicants, much more ecologically friendly, and save untold hours of travel and cost from the institutional end.

The more I sits and thinks of this, the more I wants to start the damn company myself and contract it out to the MLA, etc. … Maybe after my tenure goes through.

Excellent.

30 at the earliest? That presumes that female grad students actually have time to meet potential mates by then. I started my PhD program at 26, am now 30 and expect to graduate in 2011 (faster than average for English). I happen to be married (met my spouse before I went back to school – lucky me). But if I get pregnant now, I won’t finish my degree on time, and I put my measly funding at risk. And if I get pregnant next year, I won’t get a job. Because the accepted wisdom is that nobody hires a pregnant woman (assuming she makes it to the interview stage at all) because she’s a “risk.” You know, she might want to do it again, which would harm her productivity. Not to mention the tenure clock. Not to mention that there’s no way I could afford to have children on my measly graduate stipend – I can hardly feed, clothe, and shelter myself. And, presuming my first three jobs are postdoc or one-year appointments, this means that I will be on the job market constantly for the next three years (and likely adjuncting with no health insurance). Say I then got a job, I might respectfully wait a year before trying to get pregnant. This pushes my childbearing horizon back to 35, which, as the medical profession suggests, is too late.

To get onto tenure track I would have had to take at least one more since I was rather too busy doing useful research to play the game of writing on the topics that gains tenure. At the time, the Web was considered ‘soft’ and ‘unmanly’, too ‘commercial’. To get papers published in real journals you had to be doing stuff with obscure theoretical math.

So the folk who were pushing the broken models of network hypertext are now the ones teaching in the colleges and the folk who built the Web are out in industry or working at Tim’s highly industry facing W3C. We are only just getting to the notion that studying how people are using the Web is interesting.

The point I am making here is that the academic selection process does not get you the best candidates. In fact the best candidates will have nothing to do with the process because they have other career options that do not require them to crawl over broken glass to get there – besides paying considerably better.

And the complaint I hear from the women who have got to the top of the university ladder is that having children is not compatible with an academic career. If you look at the tenure race, it means that a woman has to put off having children until after 30 at the very earliest.

That seems to be another disciplinary difference. In philosophy I don’t know anyone whose cover letter was two pages long. Mine was barely 3/4 of a page, including the address fields at the top and the space for my signature at the bottom. If all these sorts of things are much shorter in philosophy than in English, then perhaps it does make the writing sample more relevant earlier on?

2006: 38
2007: 34
2008: 23
2009: 8.

A few more jobs will trickle along in the following weeks and months, but not many.