Does it have to be this hard?

Earlier this week, an astronomer friend of mine alerted me and his other friends on Facebook to a thought-provoking blog post by cosmologist Katie Mack. Like many other astronomers and physicists, Mack has had an itinerant career. She writes,

Those moves, Mack acknowledges, have enhanced her career, but they’ve been hard on her personal life. She recounts two severed relationships and wonders if she could own a pet. Frequent moving also compounds the problems she and other women face when pursuing an academic career. When astronomers reach their late 20s and early 30s, they’re typically looking for their next job—a tenure-track one, ideally—somewhere on the planet, not “buying houses, getting married, having babies, and generally living what looks like a regular grown-up life,” as Mack puts it.

Mack’s post evidently resonated with readers. When I last checked, it had attracted 50 thoughtful and sometimes lengthy comments—far more than other posts by her fellow bloggers on Research Whisperer . One comment, by science writer Ann Finkbeiner, particularly caught my eye. Finkbeiner wondered how such a harsh career system “ever got set up in the first place.” Her answer: “Male academics had the jobs and their wives and kids were portable.”

“Got set up” implies deliberation, which I doubt was the case; “evolved” might be more accurate. Still, the portability of spouses undoubtedly made things easier, career-wise, for the likes of Ernest Rutherford. In 1900 he returned from Cambridge University, where he had held a research fellowship, to his native New Zealand to marry Mary Georgina Newton, the daughter of his former landlady. As Rutherford pursued his career, his wife followed him to Montreal, Canada; Manchester, England; and Cambridge, England.

Regardless of how the system came to be, we can ask how it can be changed. But first, I think we should ask whether it should be changed. Given the problems that Mack and others have described, the question might not seem worth asking. But consider another workplace, the US State Department. The institution could not function without employees who are willing to work overseas. Successive moves from country to country are part of a young foreign-service officer’s job.

Universities don’t require newly hired professors to have a list of geographically dispersed former positions on their resumés, but they undoubtedly benefit from the fresh perspectives that outsiders bring. Rutherford’s first boss at Cambridge University, J. J. Thomson, actively recruited physicists who had been educated outside the university. “Aliens” is what the homegrown physicists snootily called the incomers.

Itinerancy is only one of the harsh features of an academic career path. Another, perhaps harsher one, is the practice of evaluating candidates for tenure at an age when nonacademics are starting families. The practice is not unreasonable. Being a researcher requires originality that is harder to assess in candidates who are fresh out of graduate school. If a job entails doing research, writing papers, and winning grants, then an employer needs confidence that a candidate can do those things.

Since reading Mack’s post, I’ve been wondering how to ameliorate the academic career system. One thing that might help is for US universities to discourage professors from allowing their graduate students to take longer than four years to earn their PhDs. I was educated in the UK, where degrees take less time to complete. By the time I’d finished my bachelor’s degree in physics and my PhD in astronomy, I was 26.

As a challenge, creating a workplace that’s friendly to families is not unique to academia. And even the world’s richest university, Harvard, evidently struggles to provide affordable child care. If you read Child Care@Harvard’s FAQ , you’ll find such questions as

• “How can I increase my odds of getting a slot?”
• “How long are the waiting lists, and what does my position on a waiting list mean?”
• “Why are the tuition costs so high?”

Could the academic job market be made less cutthroat? I doubt it. Competition for tenure-track positions is intense because so many people want them. The same is true for positions on professional sports teams. It may be right to discourage people from pursuing a path that has low odds of ultimate success, but it’s wrong to prevent them from doing so. Mack says she chose her career at the age of 10, when she decided she wanted Stephen Hawking’s job. She is determined to stay an academic researcher.

Of course, my failure to devise a solution to the academic job market doesn’t mean one doesn’t exist. And I welcome your suggestions. It would be a pity if the compromises that young women—and men—have to make to land a job remained so stark.