This. At least I got some disability. My husband got nothing. I’m not particularly pleased that having a family requires an enormous physical burden to begin with. I’m doubly not pleased that I have to take the entire career hit as well.
I think some people think maternity leave is a nice vacation, not a painfully sleepless necessity.
And while I am sympathetic to small employers, we, every other industrialized country finds a way to make it work.
Our own federal government offers zero maternity leave. Nothing.
I’m woefully misinformed because I just assumed that like our elementary/secondary teachers, college professors were unionized, and that such things as starting pay range, class size, vacation, maternity leave, tenure, sabbaticals, etc were set in stone.
I’m also very surprised that in this day of litigation, colleges have “unwritten” rules, such as extended maternity leave. I work for a big bad corporation. We have clear, written policies re maternity/paternity leave, vacation time, and sabbaticals, which apply to everyone. If HR were to allow exceptions to these policies, it would most certainly open up the door to discrimination lawsuits. They allowed x to extend her maternity leave from 8 weeks to 12 weeks, yet denied the same to y. Is it because y is (older, black, female)?
Many college profs are unionized and those items are negotiated and put in the contract and tend yo be pretty firm. However, even in the contracts there are mechanisms for requesting early sabbatical, early tenure consideration etc. salaries are often a range (if you come in at x rank, the salary range is a-c. Etc). Each contract is different. When I was hired my dean said she cut to the chase and offered me the very top at my rank, so there was no option to negotiate salary, but other things could’ve been.
Even in the most rigid system, there are ways to sweeten a deal. Indeed it can be especially important to get concessions in the beginning, as once you are in, you are often locked in to a structure after you are hired.
And its exactly this that will cause people to over reach - "I’d better ask for the moon and hope we meet halfway, because its not like I’m getting more vacation, higher pay (or whatever other perks are available) once I’m in.
Which can leave the hiring manager (my experience is corporate) scratching their heads and wondering if you are attached to reality.
Its also one of the reasons why you don’t bring up any of these things in the early interviews - unless you are talking in general minimum terms. The whole thing sort of stinks - you can spend hours - even days - interviewing for a position to discover that the pay scale isn’t CLOSE to what you would need because no one talked salary up front and they have no room to move - or you can price yourself right out talking to the recruiter with the first conversation.
On pulling offers - my husband had a strange one. He talked to a company for months - he was upfront with them EARLY in the process about what it would take financially for him to make the move. Since it was a cross country move to a higher cost of living increase, the amount over his current salary (which they also knew) was pretty high. He interviewed with them, they flew him out. They flew him out a second time, had him work with a realtor and a relocation specialist (he still doesn’t have the offer, but at this point things are looking pretty good, right?), and when the offer does arrive, it was not even in the ballpark. Why would you waste airfare, relocation time, etc, when you are going to pay the guy what he is making now and he told you that to move to a higher cost of living region he’d need more. He countered with what he needed to make and they came back with “you are just too expensive.” Like they didn’t know that three months ago!
We made a $65k offer to an MIT grad. She countered with $110k. That would have been more than I (the hiring manager) or my boss were making. She didn’t want to go into consulting, Wall St etc. but wanted to make the same as people were paid there.
We didn’t counter back. We couldn’t. We had already gone to the top of the range for the position. We went with someone else. We sent her a note very similar to the one Nazareth did.
She did five years in consulting and came back to us at a Director level at a LOT more than what she originally asked for.
I think two things could have been going on in my husband’s situation:
They were bargain hunting all along and hoped he’d be so invested in the IDEA of working for them that he’d take the lower salary.
They had some sort of change between the interviews - budgetary changes, organizational changes, a staffing change that changed the decision dynamics - something that made them back off on the offer in the hopes he wouldn’t take it at all (which is what happened).
He knows people there, they did an internal promotion for the spot and didn’t backfill - which makes me think there was a budgetary change.
The whole point about gender or racial (or other) discrimination today is that there will almost never be a smoking gun. We are forced to go by broad trends. And the fact that much of the reaction against W has been in misogynist or gender-biased terms, we have to deal with the fact that we do have a structural bias problem in our society. Telling women “you’re doing it wrong; you have to learn to do it right” is not an acceptable answer. The problem has to be addressed from the other side, the biased side.
This seems to assume that this one E-mail message was the sole communication between the sides. This was an academic search process, one that can take months or even years. They must have met with her on multiple occasions and communicated with each other both in person and otherwise.
It makes no sense that this one E-mail message would suddenly send them scrambling for the hills in shock. And if it did throw them for a loop, it seems to me a more reasonable course of action is not to just cut her loose, but investigate and communicate more.
I think we have to take everything W herself has disclosed as given. Otherwise, we don’t really have a basis for discussion.
It is to me if you understand that W is not a complete stranger to them and also that she is seeking her first real academic position. If what this was was a tactical negotiating error, then they shouldn’t be so thrown for a loop by it—she’s young and a novice. She has time to learn. And it doesn’t seem to me that salary/benefits/work condition negotiations are a very important qualification for teaching and research. Even if they were taken aback, again, it’s extremely strange that their reaction would be to rescind the offer.
I know nothing about academia despite having friends and family in the field. But in the rest of the world, even the most qualified candidates in a field usually have to make a trade-off between pay/career track and lifestyle. It looks a bit like this woman wanted the best of both worlds.
It doesn’t look like the college was malicious in rescinding the offer, it actually looks pretty prescient at this point.
We’re not talking about too many people taking an intro to philosophy survey course. We’re talking about too many people that have dedicated a decade to studying philosophy. What Hector is saying is that the current situation in philosophy (and frankly a lot of other majors) is like the minor leagues being open to anyone that is willing to put in the time and pay for training (in a world where the minor league is largely funded by the minor league players training fees, often paid by taking out loans) with the knowledge that MLB careers are only going to be available for a small percentage of them but as long as the baseball players keep paying for the minor league’s upkeep, they will take all comers.
And we have also seen higher unemployment rates among men than women as well during the recession. Perhaps a more aggressive attitude is more appropriate at another point in the economic cycle.
What makes you conclude that what she considered an initial bargaining position colored by “it can’t hurt to ask” reflects her actual expectations, especially when she said that they were not her actual expectations?
And someone who has gotten a Ph.D. and is currently working as a post-doc is likely very experienced in making tradeoffs between her career and her lifestyle.
After all, this is a $40,000 job she was offered. She didn’t expect to get the extras she was asking for.
I think too many people are reflexively hostile about academia and academics and really want to be able to tell them to bend over and take it, without ever understanding the context, like this:
Of course this wasn’t the only message between the sides. Where are you getting that I, or anybody else, thinks otherwise? My belief, stated earlier, is that there was dissension on the search committee, with some people very concerned that W would be a poor fit and others arguing that W’s credentials were strong enough to overcome those concerns. W’s letter flipped the switch, giving fodder to those who had already been doubtful and pulling the chair out from those who had been supportive. There’s always a tipping point.
As for “investigating more”–you would, I wouldn’t, opinion in this thread is evidently divided. I’m only saying that your statement isn’t a given.
Well, if we take everything W says as given, then we have no basis for discussion, because by definition W is right. This strikes me as a very strange way to look at the world!
But thanks for saying this–it does help me see where you’re coming from and why so much of what you’ve said about this case seems to me to be so very off.
See, I don’t see this as a rookie mistake. I see this, as I said before, as an example of a poor fit between applicant and college. (And I’m by no means the only person in this thread who has said so!) The search committees on which I have served (again, none of them college) tend to be very concerned with “fit”–we would rather have a person who will do well in the job, understand the culture of the place, etc, etc, than necessarily have one with the quote-unquote best credentials. My knowledge of Nazareth is second-hand at best, but my wife’s rather-similar institution certainly looks very closely at fit when they interview and hire.
But again, it seems like W is saying it was simply a rookie mistake and because W says so you’re “taking it as a given.” I can’t do that.
Do you have a kid who plays baseball? The funnel for baseball starts young, and its an expensive funnel. You pay big bucks to get the training and coaching required to make a competitive HIGH SCHOOL team - and that is no guarantee you’ll make the team. By the time you are looking at playing college ball, the average family will have tens of thousands of dollars invested in this - private coaching, weekends for tournaments all over the country, $400 baseball bats - only to not make the team. We aren’t talking park and rec t-ball, that everyone can sign up for, we are talking about a high stakes and highly competitive field that starts when kids are six and seven and costs families thousands - and at each step there is a funnel where some kids don’t move on to the next step.
IF you make it to a Division I or Division II college, you might see a return on your investment in terms of scholarship money. Then the profession starts getting funded. But that is after you’ve already spent a dozen years investing in the skills.
And baseball isn’t hockey. Or gymnastics. Or figure skating. Downhill skiing (my daughter races very casually, the base coaching fees for racing not casually were $5k - that’s before you do any private coaching, pay tournament entry fees, or start investing in equipment - and that’s Minnesota - Lindsey Vonn may have skied Buck Hill to start, but her serious coaching was in Colorado.) I let my kid play baseball because he was good enough at it and we could do it casually and cheaply, but he made the high school team by the skin of his teeth because he hasn’t had the three season, private coaching advantages of the kids who have invested from second grade. We said no to hockey because in Minnesota, Pee Wee hockey can be a ten thousand dollar a year investment or more and a hundred kids will try out for a twenty person squad by the time they are in high school.
Parents and kids who play sports are used to this idea (or if they aren’t, they become very disappointed when that scholarship doesn’t come through) that they are going into something that is going to take a hell of a lot of time for years and very often a hell of a lot of money - and that after investing that time and money - they may not get the scholarship, or the chance to play professionally, or the shot at Nationals.
It isn’t that much different for professional musicians - a former co-worker of mine had a son who was - at fourteen, a nationally ranked violinist. The investment was huge - tens of thousands of dollars in private lessons - his violins weren’t cheap either - $20k for a violin. For him, it paid off - not in a music career, but in a chance to go to a prestigious university (his excellent grades and test scores got him consideration - the high level of recognition he had as a violinist got him in - he still didn’t get a lot of scholarship money though - no merit scholarships at those schools and his parents income level was too high).
Sometimes academics seem to believe they are the only people who can spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars and decades developing a skill set to end up not making the cut in their profession. But in the arts and sports, this is also the norm. There is sort of an intellectual snobbery aspect to it - that the investment of a kid and his family who sinks twelve years and $200k into hockey, but doesn’t get a scholarship much less a pro career is lessor than someone who sinks $200k and eight years into a Philosophy PhD and doesn’t get a job.
I don’t accept that. Accusing a hiring manager of discrimination is a serious allegation in today’s world. A particular manager should be judged on his or her own choices and allegations should be backed up by evidence. If I’m a hiring manager, I don’t care if 99% of other hiring manager’s discriminate against women; I need to have free choice to accept or reject candidates on the merits. Without proof, I’m not on the “biased side.”
One of the problems with the school of thought that it needs to be addressed from the biased side is that it can result in no one being hired.
A number of years ago, my husband had a position open. The HR department reviewed the divisions previous hires and discovered that they didn’t have black women. Not HIS previous hires - they didn’t have black women in the division of 600 people. Now, its an IT job, I’ve known a few black women in IT - but certainly not many. Black men are rare. Women developers aren’t common - and black women developers are a needle in a haystack.
So they gave him headcount, but only if he could fill the job with a black woman. So he went looking - the net was cast far and wide. National recruiters were hired. And there was not a single qualified candidate. So the position simply did not get filled. Not with a black woman, or a black man, or a woman, or someone with disabilities, or by a white straight christian male. (He had candidates in mind - an IT job - the candidates he had were all non-white (Indian) men - and one white woman).
That’s a perfect example. Your husband has no bias against black women, nor probably anyone else. Why should any corrective measures be taken against him?
I agree with this. I’m slightly familiar with Nazareth and it is small. Like TINY small. And their claim-to-fame is that they teach teachers. There is not a lot of research going on at Nazareth. Even the raise doesn’t make much sense as Rochester has a much small cost of living than other comparable cities (Rochester, NY).
I think she asked for the moon and then was shocked that the college wasn’t even willing to give her a ladder.
He has a heavy bias in the workplace against idiots, people who aren’t qualified to do their job, and people who aren’t useful. But those people come in all genders, races, sexual orientations, et. al…
What’s your point? You present this like it’s some damning anecdote, but in reality you’ve just described the three likely outcomes of negotiating starting salary: big increase, little increase, no increase. What, in any way shape or form, gives you the impression that these results were gender based? Could it possibly be that the amounts the companies offered were as high as they were willing to go for any candidate given job scarcity?
I’ll also point out that, from what I can tell, the company that told you to take it or leave it was also the one that met your pie in the sky joke of an opening position. Was it disadvantageous to negotiate while a woman when they did that? Or only when they told you to take it or leave it?
What article? Published where? Are we talking **People **or a sociology journal? If the latter, what was the methodology? Sorry if I don’t consider your post the definitive word on the subject since a Google search for “women are better negotiators” brings up any number of articles arguing to the contrary.
I know this is IMHO, but you’ve yet to remotely prove any of this. You’re anecdotes, in part, speak to that being decidedly not the case. And yet you resort to whining and assuming another group (men in this case) have it easier because you weren’t able to get what you thought you deserved. Where does that leave you? In the same boat with most of the rest of humanity, absolutely certain that the “others” (be they white, black, asian, hispanic, male, female, skinny, athletic, good looking, smart, outgoing etc) have it easier than you.