From Inside Higher Ed this morning, interesting new results on marriage and academic careers:
A year ago, a graduate student in economics at Cornell University released a study showing that men who are married are more likely to finish doctoral programs than are single men. When Inside Higher Ed wrote about the study, the graduate student, Joseph Price, received numerous questions from readers wanting to know just how far the marriage advantage took men in academe, and where it applied to women as well.
Price went back to his data and now is out with a new study. This one shows that married men do better than single men in academe not only in finishing their Ph.D.’s, but in publishing and landing a first tenure-track job. Married women have some advantages over their single counterparts, but not as many as married men do. And students with domestic partners are somewhere in the middle. The study was based on data from 11,000 graduate students from 100 departments over a 20-year period. While separate breakdowns were not available for those couples with and without children, a majority of the men and women in the study who were married had children while in graduate school.
In case you’re wondering, Kate and I didn’t get married until after my first year in a tenure-track job (she was finishing law school). We were engaged for quite a while before that, though. I’m not sure how that fits in.
Interesting. Greta and I were not only married but had two kids while she completed grad school. She now has tenure at Davidson College. However, I dropped out of my graduate program, so I’m not sure how our anecdote relates to the statistics.
I got married in the third year of my program, and we had one of the kids before I started my dissertation. Now it is reversed, with my wife in seminary while I take care of the kids.
Unfortunately, the study seems to have been completely confined to looking at humanities academic grad students, which I would assume have a very different demographic and culture from science grad students.