leadership

Recommendations for Interviewing Job Candidates

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Photographs of a Brown University community member sharing their experience with racial microaggressions and microaffirmations.
http://www.brown.edu/race
https://flic.kr/p/oPUPYg

Please find this post at: https://clairekampdush.com/2019/08/11/recommendations-for-interviewing-job-candidates/ 

I teach a PhD Job Market course on a biennial schedule, and we always talk about ways to combat gender and race microaggressions during interviewing. Over the past year or so, it has also come up in my family development course when we discuss the motherhood penalty, and in talks I gave to the Fisher Women in Business organization at Ohio State’s Fisher College of Business. Given this, I decided to write an email to my colleagues and graduate students when we were interviewing for a new faculty colleague last year. I think there are recommendations in here for everyone. Check it out and follow this advice! I would love to hear your additional recommendations in the comments.

Dear colleagues and students,

As we bring our faculty candidates to our campus, we aim to set the tone that we are a welcoming, inclusive, and supportive community. In my role as the diversity representative on the our search, I want to offer some guidance to highlight our community and avoid challenges that can occur in an employee selection process.

First, a list of legal and illegal questions:

TOPIC LEGAL  QUESTIONS DISCRIMINATORY QUESTIONS
Family Status Do you have any responsibilities that conflict with the job attendance or travel requirements?
*If this question is asked, it must be asked of all applicants.		 Are you married?

What is your spouse’s name? What is your maiden name?

Do you have any children or plans to have them?

What are you childcare arrangements?

What is your spouse’s job?
Pregnancy Status None. Are you pregnant? When are you due?
Race None. What is your race?
Religion None. What is your religion?

What religious holidays do you observe?
Sex/Gender Identity None. Are you male or female?
Age None. How old are you?

What is your birthdate?
Sexual Identity None Are you gay?
Citizenship or Nationality Can you show proof of your eligibility to work in the United States? Are you a U.S. citizen? Where were you born?

What is your “native tongue”?
Disability Are you able to perform the essential functions of this job with or without reasonable accommodation?

Show the applicant the position description so he or she can give an informed answer.

 Are you disabled?

What is the nature or severity of your disability?

What is your condition?

Have you had any recent or past illnesses or operations?
Military What type of training or education did you receive in the military? If you’ve been in the military, were you honorably discharged?
Source: Advance, University of Michigan, Handbook for Faculty Searches and Hiring http://sitemaker.umich.edu/advance/files/HandbookforFacultySearchesandHiring.pdf.

Note that these questions can also come much more informally. For example, in talking about my own children, maybe I ask “do you have children?” That would be illegal. Or, in talking about how Columbus is a great city for your partner to also find a job, I inquire as to whether they have a partner, or even worse, I assume that they are married and in a different-gender relationship, and I ask them about their husband (if they identify as a woman). This question would be illegal. Rarely are questions asked as directly as those listed in the table above. Often times, it is in casual conversation at a meal, or on a campus tour, that these illegal questions come up. If you accidentally ask an illegal question, and you realize it before they answer, you can say “oops, never mind, you do not need to answer that” and then change the subject. It is easy to slip up when chatting, so just be cognizant. If you hear someone else ask an illegal question, you can again say “oops, never mind, you do not need to answer that” and talk to the person about why the question was not appropriate later.

Continue reading Recommendations for Interviewing Job Candidates →

Professional Organizations: Why You Should Join Them, How to Get the Most Out of Their Meetings, and How to Avoid Going Broke Doing So

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Please find this post at: https://clairekampdush.com/2016/09/07/professional-organizations/

Professional organizations and their meetings are one of the best parts of academic life. You get access to important professional resources and networks. Conferences are in fun locations – some of my favorites have been Melbourne, San Diego, New Orleans, Lausanne – and once there, you get to hang out with a bunch of people who also nerd out on good research. But, professional organizations and conferences can also feel overwhelming and mysterious to new graduate students.

Why join a professional organization?

The big question is – why join an organization in the first place? They are expensive to join, and once you graduate, they are even more expensive to maintain membership. But, they do offer a host of benefits.

Me, Kelly Musick, and Tasha Snyder on the Lavaux Vineyard walking tour outside of Lausanne, Switzerland. We were attending the Society for Longitudinal and Life Course Studies conference.

Me, Kelly Musick, and Tasha Snyder on the Lavaux Vineyard walking tour outside of Lausanne, Switzerland. We were attending the Society for Longitudinal and Life Course Studies conference. Kara Joyner was behind the camera.

Resources

Professional organizations often sponsor journals. You will have access to the journal through your membership, and often can even get print copies of journals if you prefer. But, you can probably get the journal through your institutions library, at least at most universities with graduate programs. You also get access to other professional resources, such as the mentoring program that the International Association for Relationship Research (IARR) offers. Junior scholars are paired with more senior scholars, and these senior scholars offer advice, networking opportunities, and support. Many organizations have teaching resources available, and others have professional development resources, such as example conference submissions.

Some organizations have member profiles on their websites. The Council on Contemporary Families (CCF) has a database of members that reporters can search for experts related to their reporting. The listserves maintained by professional organizations are also very useful. They are used for disseminating information such as job opportunities and as recruitment tools for studies. Some disseminate teaching resources or media articles related to the organization’s topical focus.

Most departments post their job ads to professional organization websites as well as the Chronicle of Higher Education. It is much easier to find jobs that are related to HDFS on the National Council on Family Relations (NCFR) website that to try to search the massive Chronicle database.

Finally, organizations often publish newsletters with useful articles and updates on issues of relevance to the organization, such as the funding situation at NIH or a policy brief that was recently published. You do not always need to be a member to receive these emails, so check the organization’s website to see if you can sign up for the emails even before you are a member.

New research ideas

Professional organizations, particularly through their meetings, can spark new research ideas. Consuming the latest research at conferences can help you identify exciting trends coming in the field before they even appear in the journal.  You might learn about a dataset that is publicly available that you did not know existed. You might come up with a novel research idea that you hadn’t previously thought of upon hearing a question at a talk. Thus, professional organizations can help you push your research forward.

Continue reading Professional Organizations: Why You Should Join Them, How to Get the Most Out of Their Meetings, and How to Avoid Going Broke Doing So →

Why I believe in Family Science

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Please find this post at: https://clairekampdush.com/2014/11/04/why-i-believe-in-family-science/

Today I am publishing the first publicly available ranking of Human Development and Family Science programs in North America, at least the first ranking that I am familiar with.  Why did I go to the trouble of creating this ranking? Because I believe in human development, and in particular, family science, and you should too.

photo credit: Alain Bachellier via photopin cc

photo credit: Alain Bachellier via photopin cc

When I first got my job at Ohio State, I did not like the name of our department. Human Development and Family Science?  My degrees from Illinois and Penn State were both in Human Development and Family Studies. In all honesty, I thought family science was some kind of strange term for scholars that studied families, but were not rigorous researchers. What came to mind were cross-sectional, community-based studies, where the major topic of interest was some abstract concept associated with some other abstract concept. At the point I was hired, I had just gotten done working with an economist for two years, so my use of the term endogenous was at an all time high, as was my dismissal of scholarship that I put in the “family science” category. Sometimes I would talk about my program as “family studies” because I was embarrassed of the term.

Over time, however, the term family science has grown on me. Family science used to seem like this exclusive term, whereby you had to be in a particular club, or get your PhD from a particular program, to be a “family scientist”. But, now that I have learned more about family science, I realize that it is actually an inclusive term. Actually, my article using econometrics to examine the mental health consequences of cohabitation vs. marital dissolution is family science. And so is my article looking at how playing with a “fake baby” determines your co-parenting after the real baby is on the scene. Family science is diverse, interesting, and includes a range of research topics related to the family, from family demography to family psychology, from qualitative to quantitative methods, from large, secondary datasets to small, community samples.

Continue reading Why I believe in Family Science →

Guest Post: Leadership Matters, So what’s the Matter with our Leadership Today?

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Please find this post at: https://clairekampdush.com/2014/09/29/guest-post-gavazzi-1/

I was recently having coffee with my friend and colleague Dean and Professor Steve Gavazzi to discuss the National Council on Family Relation‘s Future of Family Science task force [more on that in a future post] and I mentioned my series of blog posts on self-regulated learning and graduate education. Steve asked me – did you mention leadership training? I had to admit I hadn’t. I invited to Steve to do a blog post on leadership to round out my graduate education series. Steve did so in the context of the conversations happening about the future of family science at the national level. Enjoy!!

Stephen Gavazzi

Stephen Gavazzi

Leadership Matters, So what’s the Matter with our Leadership Today?

Growing attention is being given to the present and future state of Family Science. Witness for instance NCFR Executive Director Diane Cushman’s most recent article in the NCFR Report Magazine. Here and elsewhere, thought is being given to the need to better understand where our academic field is, and where it is going. In her thought piece, Cushman mentioned two articles that appeared in the most recent (July 2014) issue of Family Relations. One article by Hamon and Smith dealt directly with the strengths and limitations of the discipline of family science, while a second article by Hans focused attention on some of the field’s identity issues, including what it calls itself (family science, family studies, family relations, etc.). Along with several NCFR colleagues, I was invited by Family Relations editor Ron Sabatelli to respond to these two articles. My commentary, which appeared in the same issue of the journal as the Hamon and Smith and Hans articles, invited readers to focus their concentration on a number of issues related to leadership, as I believe that there is no bigger challenge to the family science field that has to be recognized and confronted today.

Here is a portion of what I stated in my commentary:

“Leaders will either insert themselves into the process of determining our destiny as a field, or else that future will be determined for us, and invariably by people who likely do not have the same appreciation for our field’s importance. To make this happen, we must become much more intentional about the way in which we develop and support the next generation of department chairs, deans, provosts, university presidents, and heads of professional organizations who quite literally will either make or break us as a discipline.”

Continue reading Guest Post: Leadership Matters, So what’s the Matter with our Leadership Today? →