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livHappy International Women's Day to all my international women and everyone who loves them.
I'm going to use the excuse of the day to post a rant that's been brewing for a while. Namely, I'm going to reveal a dirty little secret about academia that I don't think is talked about much even within the ivory tower, let alone outside it.
There are a lot, and I mean a lot, of men who only have PhDs and therefore academic careers at all, because a woman did a significant chunk the work. I don't necessarily mean what feminists refer to as 'wife-work', though that's certainly an issue. I mean the actual intellectual work of achieving the level of expertise needed for a PhD, and writing a thesis and defending it in order to prove you've reached that level.
This Twitter thread explains that in academia [...] we don't talk *nearly* enough about how MARRIAGE/COUPLING bias is at work here. And yes,![[twitter.com profile]](https://p2.dreamwidth.org/e0caa790ec10/-/twitter.com/favicon.ico)
rachelawrites is correct, both that this is a massive problem, and that it's not talked about much. It is absolutely true, and a scandal, that
But that's not the whole story of marriage bias.rachelawrites says as an aside
I personally know several women who have supported men, sometimes not even romantic partners but just friends they care about, through their PhDs by doing things like:editing chapters and rewriting them to be more coherent and rigorous indexing and referencing reading all the relevant papers each week and providing a digestible summary so that hubby can keep on top of the field without needing to put time into reading.
I know of no men who have done anything like that for their female partners. Indeed, most women I know believe the lie academia tells, that a PhD is supposed to be completely "independent" work, it's a kind of trial by ordeal where receiving help means you're just not good enough to enter the hallowed fellowship of Academe. Yet, even when it's less extreme, almost all male PhD candidates with female partners take a high level of intellectual involvement basically for granted. Girlfriends / wives of PhD students, even if they don't actually do a large part of the research and writing and planning and analysis, more often than not see it as part of their job to act as sounding boards to help the male students develop their ideas, they learn enough to hold a useful conversation about the field even if it's totally unrelated to their own intellectual interests, they help their partners or hapless friends with time planning, decision making and a whole range of other supports.
That's on top of doing more feminist-visible wife-work of taking on more than their share of household chores whenever their man has a major deadline, and let's be honest, a large proportion of a typical PhD happens in crunch mode, and actually completing the thesis almost always does. That's on top of the stuff mentioned in the Twitter thread about providing financial support when the length of the research project is longer than the duration of the funding (happens in almost every UK PhD and is common in other countries too), or when the doctorand has to give up their income-earning job in order to concentrate on the dissertation. That's on top of the work that's kind of in a grey area between intellectual and emotional labour; a lot of men rely on their partners to help them deal with panic and extreme procrastination and impostor syndrome, to sit them down at the computer and get them to write. Women either manage to bull through those obstacles alone, or they don't and they drop out.
My own student did some really good research but never managed to overcome the obstacles to writing it up. She had personal stuff going on, yes, but she also had a male partner whom she described as "really supportive", and after a while I learned that by that she meant he didn't actively forbid her to spend time working on her thesis. He didn't pout and whine if she was too busy or exhausted to hang out with him. It seems that that bare minimum counted as "supportive" compared to the male partners of most of the young women going through PhDs at the same time in the same department. On the other hand I can think of a male friend who finished a PhD some years behind schedule, while contending with untreated ADHD, mostly because a mutual female friend (not romantically involved in this case) sat down with him every day for several months and coaxed him into actually making enough progress not to get kicked out of his programme.
#NotAllMen get this kind of support; asrachelawrites notes, some men are single and don't have female friends willing to do this for them. I don't have any personal anecdotes about men with male partners and whether they do or don't get this kind of intensive intellectual-emotional support for their PhDs, and since it seems to be an area of sexism that nobody's talking about, I don't know of any research into that cohort either. I would predict, but don't know, that non-binary scholars are more likely to receive support from female or NB partners than male partners, but again, that's speculation.
What should change here is not that men should be left completely on their own to get through the extremely tough challenge of a PhD just like almost all women are. A PhD student of any gender shouldn't be left alone to figure out the conventions of academic writing and how to structure a large complex document and get to grips with the rest of their field, that's a big part of what their supervisor should be training them to do. A neurodivergent student of any gender should receive appropriate accommodations and support, and not be kicked out of their studies because they struggle with deadlines, paperwork and focus. A student of any gender suffering from mental health problems, all too often caused by the depredations of a badly-run PhD, should receive medical and emotional support from professionals and not depend on a partner. All students of all genders should receive adequate funding to live on for the whole duration of their PhD, and not be underpaid and exploited and not be cut off after three calendar years regardless of circumstances (NB most UK students who have lost a year plus of work due to the pandemic aren't getting any extension from their funders, they either have to rely on rich partners or parents, or they're SOL.)
But with the situation as it is, we have a huge cost to women, both academic and non-academic. We have a huge gap in successful completion between men who can delegate big chunks of the required intellectual development and women who have to do it all in exactly the same timeframe and meet exactly the same benchmarks without this support. Men who do go on to academic careers start with a massive leg-up, even on top of all the more general advantages of male privilege, because the work put in by their partners gets counted to their credit so it looks as if their PhDs are a better standard. Equally women who do this get absolutely nothing out of it; it's pure self-sacrifice. They might get a note of acknowledgement at best, but that is read as thanking them for doing the housework while their husband studies, not for their meaningful intellectual contribution to the work. Doing two people's housework for months is itself a valuable thing to do, but it's not at all regarded by academia. So women who want academic careers are penalized, or in too many cases cut off altogether, because they don't get the support their male counterparts do, and women in other walks of life take a huge hit to their own financial security and career development because they spend all that time and energy and money and willingness to be "mobile" getting their male partners through their PhDs. In fact many women fall into both categories.
There's also the usual secondary consequence of sexism, which is that mediocre men fail upwards. There are an awful lot of men who have what look superficially like successful academic careers, but don't actually know how to read and synthesize the literature, or write complex articles, or organize their time; they lack the skills a PhD graduate should have, because they delegated all that less glamorous stuff to their girlfriends. Sometimes they do ok because their wives continue to cover for them, but it's honestly a lot harder to do that to manage a complex mid-career academic role than a PhD, at least partly because you don't get the luxury of locking yourself away for half a year to analyse your findings in extensive detail. Once you're actually trying to run a research team rather than just working on your own personal project, it's much harder for a spouse to cover up for your deficiencies. These men go on to be terrible supervisors in their own right, because they don't know how to train their students in skills they never properly mastered themselves. Indeed they likely subconsciously expect that students will have a wife or girlfriend or sympathetic friend to get them through, just like these men had themselves, and so the cycle perpetuates.
And honestly female PhDs who've come through this grinder don't necessarily do a lot better, because they copy the model they saw of leaving their PhD students to flounder. I think I'm in many ways guilty of this myself; I got some decent support from my on-paper 'secondary supervisor', (actually the person who did 90% of my training), a female post-doc only a few years older than me, and I tried to offer the same to my own students. But the support that was enough for me as a highly advantaged student in several respects turned out not to be enough for my two students who were in much more taxing circumstances. What I didn't have was any support at all from my institution, indeed when I tried to ask for help (to deal with bullying and harassment in one case, and mental health problems in another), I was penalized for it and that's a large part of why I got pushed off the mainstream academic track by my late 30s despite a promising start. Is that sexism? Not directly, I didn't fail at my academic career specifically because I'm female or because anyone in a position of power explicitly held the belief that my gender made me a bad scientist, but the sexism of who gets credit for PhD work played a role.
I haven't even touched on caring responsibilities here. That's a topic that generally is talked about when people are bewailing sexism in academia, but it absolutely multiplies with all the other stuff. Women have to do their PhDs and establish their careers, not only with almost no support but in many cases they have to fit it round childcare or other caring roles. Men get to palm all the parenting responsibility off onto their wives because they have to focus on the PhD, and we all know they never in fact return to taking an equal role once the PhD is handed in.
I'm going to use the excuse of the day to post a rant that's been brewing for a while. Namely, I'm going to reveal a dirty little secret about academia that I don't think is talked about much even within the ivory tower, let alone outside it.
There are a lot, and I mean a lot, of men who only have PhDs and therefore academic careers at all, because a woman did a significant chunk the work. I don't necessarily mean what feminists refer to as 'wife-work', though that's certainly an issue. I mean the actual intellectual work of achieving the level of expertise needed for a PhD, and writing a thesis and defending it in order to prove you've reached that level.
This Twitter thread explains that in academia [...] we don't talk *nearly* enough about how MARRIAGE/COUPLING bias is at work here. And yes,
Academia is using marriage to subsidize its poverty-creating labor practices.And this dynamic is hella gendered; a man who is willing to compromise his earnings and career trajectory to support a woman's academic career, and also support her financially while she's underpaid or not paid at all, is unicorn-rare. And women who have female partners who are rich enough to do this exist, but numbers are much smaller than women who just can't make it because they don't have that level of financial support.
But that's not the whole story of marriage bias.
in ye olden days, wives often acted as defacto unpaid secretaries to their academic husbands. In fact, my experience has over and over again shown that it's still true, no "ye olden days" about it. And often it's not even secretarial work, though that itself is a huge contribution to smoothing a lucky man's path through his PhD and academic career. It's straight-up intellectual work.
I personally know several women who have supported men, sometimes not even romantic partners but just friends they care about, through their PhDs by doing things like:
I know of no men who have done anything like that for their female partners. Indeed, most women I know believe the lie academia tells, that a PhD is supposed to be completely "independent" work, it's a kind of trial by ordeal where receiving help means you're just not good enough to enter the hallowed fellowship of Academe. Yet, even when it's less extreme, almost all male PhD candidates with female partners take a high level of intellectual involvement basically for granted. Girlfriends / wives of PhD students, even if they don't actually do a large part of the research and writing and planning and analysis, more often than not see it as part of their job to act as sounding boards to help the male students develop their ideas, they learn enough to hold a useful conversation about the field even if it's totally unrelated to their own intellectual interests, they help their partners or hapless friends with time planning, decision making and a whole range of other supports.
That's on top of doing more feminist-visible wife-work of taking on more than their share of household chores whenever their man has a major deadline, and let's be honest, a large proportion of a typical PhD happens in crunch mode, and actually completing the thesis almost always does. That's on top of the stuff mentioned in the Twitter thread about providing financial support when the length of the research project is longer than the duration of the funding (happens in almost every UK PhD and is common in other countries too), or when the doctorand has to give up their income-earning job in order to concentrate on the dissertation. That's on top of the work that's kind of in a grey area between intellectual and emotional labour; a lot of men rely on their partners to help them deal with panic and extreme procrastination and impostor syndrome, to sit them down at the computer and get them to write. Women either manage to bull through those obstacles alone, or they don't and they drop out.
My own student did some really good research but never managed to overcome the obstacles to writing it up. She had personal stuff going on, yes, but she also had a male partner whom she described as "really supportive", and after a while I learned that by that she meant he didn't actively forbid her to spend time working on her thesis. He didn't pout and whine if she was too busy or exhausted to hang out with him. It seems that that bare minimum counted as "supportive" compared to the male partners of most of the young women going through PhDs at the same time in the same department. On the other hand I can think of a male friend who finished a PhD some years behind schedule, while contending with untreated ADHD, mostly because a mutual female friend (not romantically involved in this case) sat down with him every day for several months and coaxed him into actually making enough progress not to get kicked out of his programme.
#NotAllMen get this kind of support; as
What should change here is not that men should be left completely on their own to get through the extremely tough challenge of a PhD just like almost all women are. A PhD student of any gender shouldn't be left alone to figure out the conventions of academic writing and how to structure a large complex document and get to grips with the rest of their field, that's a big part of what their supervisor should be training them to do. A neurodivergent student of any gender should receive appropriate accommodations and support, and not be kicked out of their studies because they struggle with deadlines, paperwork and focus. A student of any gender suffering from mental health problems, all too often caused by the depredations of a badly-run PhD, should receive medical and emotional support from professionals and not depend on a partner. All students of all genders should receive adequate funding to live on for the whole duration of their PhD, and not be underpaid and exploited and not be cut off after three calendar years regardless of circumstances (NB most UK students who have lost a year plus of work due to the pandemic aren't getting any extension from their funders, they either have to rely on rich partners or parents, or they're SOL.)
But with the situation as it is, we have a huge cost to women, both academic and non-academic. We have a huge gap in successful completion between men who can delegate big chunks of the required intellectual development and women who have to do it all in exactly the same timeframe and meet exactly the same benchmarks without this support. Men who do go on to academic careers start with a massive leg-up, even on top of all the more general advantages of male privilege, because the work put in by their partners gets counted to their credit so it looks as if their PhDs are a better standard. Equally women who do this get absolutely nothing out of it; it's pure self-sacrifice. They might get a note of acknowledgement at best, but that is read as thanking them for doing the housework while their husband studies, not for their meaningful intellectual contribution to the work. Doing two people's housework for months is itself a valuable thing to do, but it's not at all regarded by academia. So women who want academic careers are penalized, or in too many cases cut off altogether, because they don't get the support their male counterparts do, and women in other walks of life take a huge hit to their own financial security and career development because they spend all that time and energy and money and willingness to be "mobile" getting their male partners through their PhDs. In fact many women fall into both categories.
There's also the usual secondary consequence of sexism, which is that mediocre men fail upwards. There are an awful lot of men who have what look superficially like successful academic careers, but don't actually know how to read and synthesize the literature, or write complex articles, or organize their time; they lack the skills a PhD graduate should have, because they delegated all that less glamorous stuff to their girlfriends. Sometimes they do ok because their wives continue to cover for them, but it's honestly a lot harder to do that to manage a complex mid-career academic role than a PhD, at least partly because you don't get the luxury of locking yourself away for half a year to analyse your findings in extensive detail. Once you're actually trying to run a research team rather than just working on your own personal project, it's much harder for a spouse to cover up for your deficiencies. These men go on to be terrible supervisors in their own right, because they don't know how to train their students in skills they never properly mastered themselves. Indeed they likely subconsciously expect that students will have a wife or girlfriend or sympathetic friend to get them through, just like these men had themselves, and so the cycle perpetuates.
And honestly female PhDs who've come through this grinder don't necessarily do a lot better, because they copy the model they saw of leaving their PhD students to flounder. I think I'm in many ways guilty of this myself; I got some decent support from my on-paper 'secondary supervisor', (actually the person who did 90% of my training), a female post-doc only a few years older than me, and I tried to offer the same to my own students. But the support that was enough for me as a highly advantaged student in several respects turned out not to be enough for my two students who were in much more taxing circumstances. What I didn't have was any support at all from my institution, indeed when I tried to ask for help (to deal with bullying and harassment in one case, and mental health problems in another), I was penalized for it and that's a large part of why I got pushed off the mainstream academic track by my late 30s despite a promising start. Is that sexism? Not directly, I didn't fail at my academic career specifically because I'm female or because anyone in a position of power explicitly held the belief that my gender made me a bad scientist, but the sexism of who gets credit for PhD work played a role.
I haven't even touched on caring responsibilities here. That's a topic that generally is talked about when people are bewailing sexism in academia, but it absolutely multiplies with all the other stuff. Women have to do their PhDs and establish their careers, not only with almost no support but in many cases they have to fit it round childcare or other caring roles. Men get to palm all the parenting responsibility off onto their wives because they have to focus on the PhD, and we all know they never in fact return to taking an equal role once the PhD is handed in.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-03-08 07:45 pm (UTC)On the list of types of support work, I'll add: my dad worked in a field that involves a lot of fieldwork, and would take undergrad students on field trips. My mom often went on those field trips to serve as a sort of surrogate mom for the students, because, as my dad said, their behavior was just better with an adult woman along. Which was probably true, but was still a lot of emotional labor on her part.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-03-10 12:55 pm (UTC)And the fieldwork is a stunning example: if you're in that kind of discipline, being able to organize field trips is a significant part of what's expected of a mid to senior academic. It's emotional work (being group mom!), it's administrative work, but it's also intellectual, academic work. I'm heartened to hear that your dad at least did make directly academic contributions to your mom's Masters.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-03-10 03:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-03-11 12:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-03-08 09:26 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-03-08 09:35 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-03-10 01:53 pm (UTC)At least in your case you are sometimes in a position to include your non-academic female supporters as co-authors not just a little footnote in the acknowledgements. Plus I recall you provided quite a lot of support for Sarah T during her PhD, though that was more emotional than academic I think. I might also posit that your first PhD attempt was more female-typical, in that you were abandoned with very little support or even social contact, and badness ensued.
I guess as a supervisor you have a pretty good idea which of your students have supportive partners and which are struggling on their own. Even if you are generally in a male-ish position you can probably do some good by taking that into account.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-03-09 01:02 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-03-10 03:43 pm (UTC)I could well believe that you've seen more men than I have providing this kind of intellectual support, and that's definitely a good thing. But perhaps the more extreme end of the spectrum of "support" is missing, there aren't men who master the field and read all the literature and then teach it to their wives? I would really like to be wrong about that; part of the problem here is that I'm just not seeing this talked about at all, so I haven't seen any formal studies whatsoever, and obviously just relying on people I happen to know doesn't give me a picture of all of academia.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-03-11 12:44 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-03-09 01:43 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-03-10 04:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-03-09 03:44 am (UTC)I saw that Twitter thread and my immediate response was that "This is also a thing that happens in the non-profit/charity sector" with the coupling subsidizing a sector that doesn't pay enough. (Luckily, someone else posted that so that I didn't feel too tempted to tweet back my own rant ... from my account that my work follows.)
The mechanisms and results are a bit different though. I've been told by several women colleagues that the only way they can afford to live off their salary is because their male partner is in tech (or insert-well-paid-sector here). Effectively, he's supplementing her income so she can have the fuzzy-feel-good-job that's not appropriately compensated. But this also has the effect of putting her career second, and making her dependent on his income. She's willing to do it because women are used to being underpaid and undervalued, and charity work is "nurturing/caring". If they have kids, her career will take the backseat because she's the one who is making less, and doing "softer" work.
Interestingly, my org is currently celebrating how many women work there (it is "female dominated", although I really don't think people would remark on it if it was 70% male). Behind the scenes, this may actually signal, "men don't bother working here because it pays too little".
I think among my colleagues, I'm one of the few (only?) women who actually makes more than their male partner. He also moved to accommodate my career. My male colleagues all make more than their female partners though. (I don't attribute this to a gender pay gap at the organization, but more a societal, "male partners tend to out-earn their female partners" trend.)
I definitely helped a male friend of mine through his Masters. Our projects were related and I always managed to be 1-3 steps ahead of him. I'd edit his work and coach him through the stuff I'd just done. He did, at least, have the courtesy to give me a special acknowledgement in his thesis. But, it would have been more useful if I could have gotten the same kind of editing in return.
That said, my male partner was very much a sounding-board and could explain my research almost better than I could because he heard it so much. He didn't have the background to help with the stats, but he did the emotional support work. I wouldn't say he did anywhere near the work that a woman might put in to her male partner's work, but it was probably more than many men put into their female partner's work.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-03-11 12:26 pm (UTC)I'm glad you personally had meaningful support with your research, after doing one and half Masters in exchange for only an acknowledgement. Probably on an individual level it isn't cause-and-effect, but overall in society there's a correlation between women being the higher earners in an opposite sex couple, and men providing the kind of support usually assumed to be a woman's role.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-03-09 02:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-03-09 07:57 pm (UTC)I don't know if this differs depending on subject but I honestly never saw any men or women getting the kind of support that you mention. Most people I knew doing PhDs had partners who were barely aware of what it was about.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-03-11 12:38 pm (UTC)I learned that this kind of intensive support existed purely by talking to the women who provided it. It's not universal, certainly not, there absolutely are women who hardly understand their partner's topic. Which should really be the default state of affairs, a PhD is by definition a highly specialist degree and you normally wouldn't expect anyone outside the field to understand much about it.
Also, if you are only considering people who actually have PhDs then your sample is definitely not representative; only about 50% of people who start a PhD actually complete the doctorate. I don't know if there's a gender bias in people who drop out and if this can be attributed to unsupportive partners. I do think a big reason for this extremely high drop out rate is the mismatch between the myth that you can do a four year intensive research and analysis project completely on your own with no support, and the reality that even genuinely brilliant people often can't do that.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-03-10 05:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-03-11 12:44 pm (UTC)There's probably something bigger going on about mobility. People move a long way from home to undertake PhDs or to progress their subsequent academic careers. And if their partner isn't willing to relocate with them, they either have no partner at all (whether supportive or unsupportive), or they give up on opportunities they might have otherwise taken. But moving back with parents when your funding runs out is another way to solve the whole mess of the PhD system, but it's probably not something academia should be depending on, on the whole.