Monday, November 01, 2010

More interestingness

Our small university publisher is being taken over by a Big Name Big Deal publisher. I wonder whether this means the books in press I have stuff in are going to be published with the better imprint? That would make me really quite happy.

It looks like there might be a chance I can change my fellowship to a four-year option (with teaching) instead of the three year (no teaching) one I currently have. *ponder*

And my (new) department is about to advertise a job. They have never ever hired a woman in the long history of the department. And the university is getting progressively more annoyed with them, every time they continue to select the one man out of a pool of highly competitive women. So this time they have decided to advertise specifically for women. I.e. no men can apply.

This is pissing off a lot of people. Mostly men, who would otherwise be applying. But also some women, who feel like they wouldn't be taken seriously if they did get the job, because people wouldn't believe they are good enough to get a job without affirmative action. I don't really know what to think about it, myself. What about you?

5 Comments:

Ianqui said...

Mostly I can't believe that's legal, b/c I don't think it would be in the US.

StyleyGeek said...

Yeah, I was surprised it's legal too. But it definitely is: the university has done it before in other departments with the same problem.

Liz Miller said...

What they should do is advertise it to everybody, but have all resumes go to an outside person to strip out all the identifying information off the resumes, so that they only see the history, not the names. Then they can pick the top X out of that stack and start interviewing.

Grace Dalley said...

But then you still find out the genders in the interviews. Yeah I'm not sure what to think either, but kudos to them for at least being upfront about wanting a woman. I can imagine it would be worse if there was only rumour and speculation.

StyleyGeek said...

Yeah, the problem has been the interviews. HR has usually insisted that they interview at least one woman, but she never gets selected.