Over the years, I've told colleagues and friends about things I have seen or experienced. Many times, people have said that I should write them down so that they won't be lost and forgotten, since some of them might be useful parts of our history. I've been writing them down, without being sure what I would do with them. I decided to gradually post them on this website, and see what reactions I get. I suggest reading from the bottom up (starting with the August 2017 post "The Meritocracy"). Thoughtful and kind feedback would be useful for me, and would help me to revise the exposition to make it as useful as possible. I hope that while you read my stories you will ask yourself "What can I learn from this?" I'm particularly interested in knowing what you see as the point of the story, or what you take away from it. Please send feedback to asilverb@gmail.com. Thanks for taking the time to read and hopefully reflect on them!

I often run the stories past the people I mention, even when they are anonymized, to get their feedback and give them a chance to correct the record or ask for changes. When they tell me they're happy to be named, I sometimes do so. When I give letters as pseudonyms, there is no correlation between those letters and the names of the real people.

Saturday, September 4, 2021

"But she misled us" (or: Hire people based on their own merits)

I am not enamored of discrimination on the basis of marital status.

In the late 1970s, two grad students told me that when they got married, their university took away one of their stipends, telling them that "two can live as cheaply as one."

Later, a mathematician told me that a department that planned to offer her a tenure-track job instead offered her a postdoc position, since the department was also offering her husband a postdoc job and thought they could get away with giving her a lower position than she deserved. She and her husband turned down the jobs, and took better offers elsewhere.

More recently, the pendulum has swung the other way. Rather than punishing women for being married, they're sometimes rewarded for it.

A scientist told me about two people her department hired, thinking that they were a married couple. Their new colleagues were angry when they found out the two weren't actually married, just living together. If the faculty had known, they wouldn't have offered a job to the woman.

Personally, I think that a job offer should be based on merit, rather than assumptions about the applicant's marital status. I think it's unfair to pass over people who worked harder and accomplished more, for reasons that are not based on merit or need.

A math department made an offer to a woman who then asked them if they could hire her husband. The department then hired the husband, but was furious when the couple divorced, especially when it turned out that the divorce had been in the works while they were on the job market. The two mathematicians wanted to live in the same city since they had joint custody of their children. But the department felt tricked into making an offer under false pretenses.


I think that people should be hired based on their own merits, not on someone else's. If you are contemplating giving someone an advantage or disadvantage based on what you think is their marital status, keep in mind that:
  • The situation might not be what you think it is.
  • Circumstances can change. The person you really wanted might leave or die, and you might be stuck with the one you didn't want. Are you OK with that? Would it change your decision?
  • Someone might be hurt by your actions. Are you passing over people who are better? Is that fair? Is it legal?