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This report provides a complete overview of the Partner Hire Scorecard project. The report’s goals are to provide clarity about the dual-career approaches of R1 universities in the United States. We’ve assessed publicly available documents pertaining to dual-career issues at these universities and have generated a “scorecard” that ranks institutions by their partner-friendly status. Moreover, we’ve archived the relevant documents so that jobseekers, researchers, and other interested parties can access them without needing to conduct their own web searches. Finally, we coded and analyzed these many documents to discover patterns in dual-career offerings by institution type, geographic location, and other variables. The “findings” section of this report reviews those overall results. 

Abstract Meeting the needs of dual-career academic couples has become an important part of university efforts to foster family-friendly workplaces. Many universities have developed formal or informal approaches to addressing dual-career issues, but variation across institutions has made it difficult to detect wider patterns or probe their implications. In this paper, we analyze the dual-career policies and materials (848 documents total) of all R1 institutions in the United States. As with studies from roughly two decades ago, we find deficiencies in institutional support and transparency. However, given reduced state revenues for institutions of higher education and a rise in precarious employment arrangements over the same time period, conditions for academic couples are arguably worse today. In order for universities to address these concerns and contribute meaningfully to broader forms of inclusion, we argue that there is a need for sustained funding commitments and infrastructural support for dual-career programs.