To get more bang for the grant buck, ban institutional overhead. Ban investigator salaries and fringe. If the institution wants research, they can pay for the investigator’s time.

Make the review process blind. Forbid any indication of a proposal’s author. Any clues in a proposal to the author’s identity disqualify it.

Oh how I wish your parents had followed your advice.

While my heart tells me to support the two-body solution in academia (many people I hold dear are in that situation), your arguments are far from convincing. I am not sure why, for example, a couple in the same field should be preferred over a couple in different fields (with the same level of scarcity — I’m talking chemist-chemist vs. chemist-historian, not vs. chemist-firefighter). Also, why should we take a good female biologist with a less-than-good biologist husband over an awesome female biologist? I am a strong advocate for finding ways to promote equal access for women in academia, but I am afraid that the two-body solution might be abused in a direction opposite to this. It is important to discuss this in an open way, without resorting to remarks like “I have much to say to you”, which add nothing to the conversation.

Let me tell you, it doesn’t feel trivial when my spouse isn’t an academic and I am :-/

Some U.S. universities are offering progressive parental leave programs. I know that MIT, for example, offers semester-long parental leave for faculty, and this leave pauses the seven-year clock for tenure review.

Not that I’m down on adoption. My wife and I just adopted a baby girl. But this is after years of trying and failing to have a biological child, and that happened because we put off family too long, and the bio. clock had already ticked down to zero.

Assisted reproductive therapy can be more traumatic and expensive than most ever imagine. So can be the process of successfully adopting even a single child. We are overjoyed to finally have our daughter, but it was pure Hell getting to this point.

“Well, they could always adopt.” Fuck you, sir. No, really. Fuck you.

Hang in there. You’re right that the perception that it can’t be done is much harder to deal with than actually balancing family and research, and unfortunately this perception can have an impact on your career — but it doesn’t have to.

Finding the right advisor or mentor is extremely important, and they do exist. Someone who views/treats you as a promising physics student (who may also play the violin or have a child or enjoy rock climbing,…). If they’re in short supply at your institution, you will have to be more outgoing (with your science)/persistent/demanding. It’s not fair that you have to work harder to counteract a misperception, but worth it in the long run. If you’re having trouble finding an advisor or group to work with, try to identify someone in the department (even outside your research area) that you can talk to and who can help mentor you. This is not to absolve your department or the field from the need to make changes, but it’s also important for you to focus on your science, and you don’t have time to wait for the larger changes that are needed.

There are definitely examples of successful physicists who had children early in their careers.
A recent panel on women in the physical sciences featured 4 senior women who had had long and successful careers in science. It wasn’t until they were talking with each other just before the panel presentation that they realized that all four had children as graduate students or postdocs.

Good luck.

I’ve never heard it in that sense. Using it that way makes it trivial: it applies to almost all couples. If we think about, say, the nurse and the lorry driver, or the free-lance writer and the cook, then it is probably easier for them to both find jobs reasonably near each other. In academia, where jobs are few and far between, it is more difficult. No-one debates that this is a problem. What I object to is someone getting a job on the basis of the spouse being a very good academic, implying that someone else, probably better qualified, did not get said job.

Applause to parents like #7 Kati who have to work extra hard to get things done in low paying academic positions, including being a student researcher.

Working in research projects that require you to come in at 3 in the morning to recalibrate your samples is hard enough on single male engineering students like myself, esp with winter coming. Has to be incredibly tough if you actually want to do it, while managing a family.

While I don’t expect the NSF or the government to micromanage and make things easier at these local scales, any step toward reducing the stress for women and men, is good for science.

Solve the two-body problem in a manner which doesn’t involve giving a job to someone who otherwise would not have gotten it. Where’s the difference between that and getting a job because you agree to have sex with your future boss? In both cases a person gets a job he (or she) would otherwise not have got because he (or she) had sex with the “right” person; it’s just that the “right” person is different in the two cases.

Also, there are couples who are much worse off than two academics, for example couples where the non-academic cannot work quickly (if at all) in another country. If we want to help spouses get income they otherwise would not have, we can’t discriminate against non-academic spouses.

Nevermind that I’m on campus–already fully caffeinated and ready to work–HOURS before my childless peers. Nevermind that I’m productive the entire workday–no Facebooking, no YouTubing, no goofing off or chatting–when the other RAs aren’t. Somehow, just being a *mother* means I’m a less devoted researcher. Or, at least that’s how I’m treated.

Yes, motherhood is a stigma in physics.