Pressured to consider female candidates

I applied for a tenure-track academic job at the university where I got my bachelor's and master's degrees. The current department head there knows me fairly well. He taught me both undergraduate and graduate classes, in which I did very well. He also supervised my undergraduate thesis, and gave me an excellent grade. When the faculty position opened up, he wrote me personally and asked me to apply.

All this to say, I thought I might have a reasonable shot at this job.

My PhD co-advisor (the one who didn't really do the major advising work) just came in to talk to me. He had gotten a request for a letter of recommendation, and had called this department head to ask for details about what he should put in the letter, and what exactly they were looking for in a candidate. What he learned from the conversation does not look good for me.

I'm not being seriously considered for the job. Apparently the department head felt "pressured to consider female candidates." This is somewhat understandable. The department has never had a female faculty member. Seriously. Did you even know there are departments in the world that don't have even one woman? They have once made an offer to a woman; she chose to work at another university, which also had a faculty opening for her husband.

While I understand to some degree the politics that force search committees to put a token woman on their shortlist, it also pisses me off. They're wasting my time and the time of my recommenders, and they have no intentions whatsoever of actually hiring me. And now that I've been fit into this token-woman spot, I doubt I'll be able to get out of it. Even stunning recommendations are unlikely to change the minds of the search committee, now that they've been biased against me.

The truth is, I know I'm not that great a candidate. I have a single publication in review right now, and this is a Research I school. Yeah, I need to publish more. I also need to learn to write grant proposals. Other than that I'm pretty good (growing subfield, good school, teaching experience with positive evaluations, can make an excellent presentation) but not quite good enough, yet. So if my publication record wasn't good enough, they should have just not considered me. Also, there's a relatively young faculty member there whose research overlaps significantly with my own, so I can see them thinking they don't need to expand that subfield.

I'm disappointed. I had problems with this school anyway: the unsupportive administrative staff; the long public-transit commute to anywhere I'd want to live; and I didn't actually want to take on all the burdens of being the first woman professor. But as I started to think I had a shot, I was coming up with positives: the friends I have in the city; the excellent quality of the students; the opportunity to be a sorely-needed female role model for the women students.

There's no reason for them to mess with me like this, and to waste their time and mine.

Introduction

Two days ago, on Friday, I achieved two major milestones. First, I handed in a completed PhD thesis. It was on special magic thesis paper and was even signed by my committee. This means that, when the university gets around to planning a big ceremony, I'll be getting a PhD.

I'm trying to protect my pseudonymity here, so I won't tell you exactly what it is I study, or where. It's in a technical field. Take the most impressive field of study you can think of. No, that's not what I study. Think of another. That's the one. I study the second-most-cool-sounding technical field. Now think of the most "prestigious" school in the United States where a random layperson thinks one would go to study that field. Yes, that's where I am.

I'm not saying those things to brag, just to give you some idea of where I'm coming from. I will tell you that the field, while interesting to me, isn't nearly as cool or as difficult as most people think it is. And my narrow specialty sounds much less cool than the field as a whole. And the school? Yeah, it's a good school. It has a lot of money, and that makes a big difference. My department in particular is awesome, with, on average, very good faculty, and administrative staff who are actually helpful, rather than obstacles to getting work done.

Second, I passed the twelve-week mark in my pregnancy. Some sources claim that after 12 weeks, the risk of miscarriage decreases substantially. I've also heard the same happens at 8 weeks, 10 weeks, and 14 weeks, so I don't have huge confidence in 12 being some kind of magic number. Most likely the odds decrease exponentially with time, and experts just simplify it for the laywoman by giving these arbitrary dates. Numbers I've heard, for the odds past 12 weeks, are 3% and 5%, so the odds of miscarriage aren't even that low. And I've read enough about all the various things that can go wrong, even late, in a pregnancy, that I'm not overly cavalier. But yeah, it's looking like the best prediction is that sometime in December a mewling, slimy mini-person will emerge from my vagina. How very, very, odd.

And thus, after passing those two milestones, I decided to start a blog. I made an attempt once before, but overreached a little and got frustrated with myself. This one will be about my experiences as a post-doc, my search for a job as a professor, and my pregnancy. I presume the intersection of the last two may provide some entertainment. I make no promises about the frequency or quality of my posts.

As for my handle, I prefer to pronounce it in three syllables: "con-FOO-zed", but that's up to you.