The correct translation of the College’s reply is:
“We were looking for someone whose first priority is what they can offer us to help teach our students. It appears your first priority is to contract for how minimally you can work and still be guaranteed a salary. We aren’t looking for a candidate with that kind of motivation, and in our opinion, you are more likely to find that sort of position at a University.”
Anyone seeing this story will be reminded that the right teaching job–particularly a tenured one–is a pretty soft job to have. Nothing wrong with going after such a job right out of the box, but in the real world an employer is more likely to retain an interest in an applicant whose first priority is to show what they can bring to the table, and not what they hope to be guaranteed up front before they can make it guaranteed it for life.
Maternity leave isn’t fun vacation with baby. It’s an often unpleasant concession to the reality that newborns have to eat every two hours, round the clock, and that day cares generally do not accept infants under a certain age. Unless you can afford a night nanny, no maternity leave means no kids.
Everyone has to make choices about how much time they spend with family, but it seems like only women are asked to just plain not have a family if they are “serious” about career (not necessarily what is happening in this case, but the idea of maternity leave as an extra reinforces that.)
Having a new employee go through the process of leaving an old job and reworking their life to join your company, and then quickly letting them go just because you decide don’t like them, is DEFINITELY not kosher. Any company who earns a reputation for this deserves to have a hard time finding applicants.
And having an employee who may look good on paper and interviewed well, but two weeks later is a not a good fit, is not any fun, either. Companies are not obligated to employ forever. Additionally, if it’s a poor fit, the employee isn’t happy to be there.
I don’t think many good companies hire rashly. Finding, hiring, and training are time consuming and expensive. They want it to work out well.
This woman deselected herself, and I don’t blame the college. Sounded like a piece work.
The problem there is the selection process. Hiring managers don’t often have criteria for selecting individuals that will be successful. And the whole topic of “fit and talent” is something for another thread.
IMO the problem wasn’t that she asked for maternity leave. Lots of professional women ask for maternity leave; it’s a fairly common benefit. The problem is she asked for the moon.
I agree. The most charitable interpretation one could make of the applicant’s after-the-fact negotiation ploy is that she was more interested in research than in teaching, which clearly was the opposite of this small college’s priority. However her other demands do indeed seem consistent with preferring not to work at all. She comes across to me as an airhead with a sense of entitlement. It’s interesting that the first thing she did after the offer was rescinded was to publicly rant all over the Internet. As someone else mentioned somewhere, the college may have dodged a bullet here.
I wouldn’t agree with your comment about academia – it’s just quite different than most of the world in terms of freedom. Some of the corporate world has similarities but only in the rarified atmosphere of big-company labs. It’s something like being an IBM Fellow, where the job description is “do whatever you want – we trust it will turn out to be useful.” That’s actually a good deal more pressure than being a flunky, plus academia almost always has a teaching load on top of that. Having a great deal of academic freedom isn’t the same as being “soft”. An incompetent without tenure will be out on their ass pretty soon, and anyone with tenure has already proven their worth.
A) I have kids, I know maternity leave is not a vacation.
B) FMLA guarantees you medical leave that is usually long enough to wean your kid. I think we should have paid maternity leave that pays as much as unemployment.
C) This woman isn’t just asking for maternity leave despite how some people are trying to frame the issue. If it was just maternity leave, the debate would be pretty one sided.
D) I know plenty of women with successful careers and they are (as a population) just as estranged from their kids as the successful men (as a population) are from their kids. But a lot of women (and more and more men these days) want a closer connection to their kids and won’t put career ahead of their family, some people have the energy and drive to make it work without sacrificing their career but most people don’t. They are competing with people who either don’t have a family or are willing to put their careers ahead of their families. Life’s tough that way sometimes.
I haven’t seen anyone frame this as primarily about maternity leave. But you made the comment about having to trade off family, and maternity leave is the only thing on her list that explicitly has to do with family.