<p>Pizzagirl, not sure why you seem so unhappy about this. My own perspective on this comes from starting my career as an academic, having worked on Wall Street for a few years before starting a consulting firm that works for (usually large) companies all over the world. I’m in daily contact with folks in various companies. When I left Wall Street, I was offered a sub-cabinet level position in Washington (Deputy Under Secretary for something) and have worked with people in various governments. I work with lawyers and am friends with doctors and hospital presidents. My business partner is a professor at the business school at which I began my career and upon occasion still teach. So, I’m in contact with a lot of different kinds of lives, academic, law, business, medicine, government, art, …</p>
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<li><p>You are right, Pizzagirl and others, that the two-body problem is a problem that confronts most two career couples. </p></li>
<li><p>The scarcity of jobs in some fields makes the two-body problem harder. </p></li>
<li><p>My own personal experience is that male academics are not disproportionately more likely to marry academics. However, I think female academics are disproportionately married to male academics. [This is possible because in my world there are many more male academics].</p></li>
<li><p>To assume that the two-body problem is the same for every field because all couples face it, as PizzaGirl seems to be doing above, is to ignore the scarcity of jobs in certain fields.</p></li>
<li><p>As I mentioned in an earlier post, my relative’s GF is a grad student in the humanities at Harvard. Seemingly very bright and a real go-getter. In her field, there are three jobs on offer in the whole continent of North America this year. THREE. If I wanted to do strategy consulting, I can talk to many firms with offices in many cities. As a lawyer, I may be stuck in a state, but there are typically many firms that might be hiring. As a doctor, there are lots of hospitals, some not so good for me, some that don’t offer my specialty, but with some adjustment or compromise, I can work in lots of cities. My previous assistant’s husband worked for radio stations and moved from NJ to Boston to Seattle. He had to find stations that needed a certain kind of person. If I’m a food scientist, I can probably work at a number of different companies in a variety of different cities, although these may not be in the same towns that the best corporate law firms are in (assuming my wife is a lawyer). But, in my relative’s GF’s field, if she were supremely lucky, she’s part of a cast of hundreds interviewing for 3 jobs, one in rural Minnesota, one in Montreal, and didn’t hear where the third one was. Her BF is in the sciences and is very employable, but the LAC in rural Minnesota likely doesn’t even have a lab in his field pr the budget to fund it. He probably can find a fit in Montreal. But, if he were a Latin professor, there might also be three jobs in the country and they might not overlap with Montreal, rural Minnesota and Missoula, Montana. I think as a matter of kind, this is not different from doctors or lawyers or strategy consultants or food scientists, but as a matter of degree it is significantly more difficult. I can’t comment on the military as I have never worked in or with the military so I don’t understand the process there. This is not to say that there are non-academics who have as severe a version of the two-body problem as dual academic career couples. But, compare two proportions: a) number of non-academic couples with severe two-body problems divided by the number of non-academic two-career couples in the US versus b) the number of dual academic couples with severe two-body problems divided by the number of dual career academic couples in the US. Based upon my observation, I’d be stunned if proportion b weren’t a lot higher than proportion a. </p></li>
<li><p>So, in general, I haven’t seen the two-body problem be quite as severe for non-academics. Others have it. A relative is a lawyer who works in charitable giving. Her husband is a surgeon with a distinct specialty. They met while they were in school. She worked in NY while he was doing his residency. He then moved to Florida for his fellowship and she followed and had kids while working part-time IIRC. She could have gotten a full-time job had she wanted. Then, he got offers from medical schools and private practices in various cities. She helped pick DC and got a job with a museum. At a certain point, he became dissatisfied with his practice/university setup and began to look around. There was more than one teaching hospital affiliated group in his area in DC, but he didn’t click with the others. He got an unbelievable offer from a university medical school in a Southeastern state. Higher salary, unbelievable pension plan, much, much lower cost of living. She vetoed it because she didn’t want to live in the Southeast. He then took a purely private practice position (in effect self-employed) at a suburban DC hospital. She could have gotten a job in the Southeastern state had she wanted to, though she might not have loved the job or the organization as much as her current employer. The two-body problem requires coordination. And, he made a sacrifice – no teaching hospital appointment and probably lower income for a few years. She could have made the sacrifice of moving to a place she didn’t like (as faculty and corporate wives would have done years ago without a fuss) and could undoubtedly have found/created a position for herself with other organizations that need to raise money and can do so in tax-advantaged ways, but this would have been a career sacrifice as well. But, there were jobs for both, albeit lesser jobs, in each city. Each could stay in his/her field and compromise. For the classics scholar and the religion professor, it is likely there is no job in the city in which the other gets a job. The only compromise to be made is either leaving academia (not the worst thing in the world for some) or having a long-distance relationship. Non-academic couples can, at times, face the same choice, but the difference is more typically one of degree, not one of kind. Academics aren’t being arrogant (in this case at least) to note this difference of degree – it typically is worse for dual-academic couples on average than for other dual-career couples.</p></li>
<li><p>There are other careers with tight geographical constraints. My wife really didn’t want to go to Washington when I was offered a position there, and that was pretty much the only place to be at that level in the Federal government. I know a young woman who wants to sing opera. There are precious few opportunities overall and they are concentrated in a limited number of cities. This might be the case for rabbis – there just might not be an opening this year in the eastern part of a state. But, few jobs I can think of have the same geographic limitations as humanities professorships and also equivalent difficulties moving from place to place after 2 or 7 years.</p></li>
<li><p>Finally, one can live the life of the mind outside academia, although academics find it hard to conceive of real thinking taking place outside of the groves of academe (and this is arrogance but a different arrogance than that which distresses Pizzagirl). I’m on the verge of hiring a business school professor to join my firm. It has taken him a year to see that our work is extremely intellectually challenging and that we have extremely smart people who confront challenging problems and try to both solve problems and build intellectual capital. The kinds of problems we care about and the purpose of the enterprise is different than he is used to in academia, but we live the life of the mind as assuredly as do his academic colleagues.</p></li>
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(My friends at Penn and Stanford Law certainly wouldn’t.)</p>