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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. 

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. 

Purpose: Meeting the needs of dual-career academic couples can be an important step in recruiting and retaining university faculty and researchers. The goal of this essay is to review the existing scholarship on dual-career hires and offer concrete recommendations for university administrators.Background/Motivation: Attending to dual-career needs is especially relevant to efforts at diversifying the academic workforce, as multiple studies have indicated that faculty appointments are a major contributor to the so-called leaky pipeline causing attrition of women and scholars of color, particularly in biomedical and STEM fields. We take it as a feminist imperative to confront institutional discrimination against dual-career scholars and to intervene in the service of collective praxis.Intended Audience: Scholars and administrators interested in understanding and overcoming institutional barriers to achieving diverse, inclusive, and family-friendly academic workplaces.Contribution: This essay synthesizes the recent literature on dual-career hires and offers recommendations for university administrators.Positionality: We approach this issue as a senior academic couple that has navigated dual-career job searches for close to twenty years and has held faculty positions together at three different academic institutions. We are a white, hetero dual-career academic couple interested in developing resources for individuals striving to activate change at their universities.