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The Law Faculty Hiring Process: Does The Rise Of VAPs Hurt Women?

By Dan Filler

There is an interesting dialogue going on at the Volokh Conspiracy over the value, and costs, of new hiring norms in law schools.  By way of background, Corey Yung at Co-Op pointed out that law school hiring has radically tilted away from what he terms "naked JD candidates" - folks hitting the market with only a JD, a clerkship, and a job - to people who have completed fellowships or served as Visiting Assistant Professors.  This led Orin Kerr at the Conspiracy to comment that he sees this as a good change overall, producing stronger entry-level candidates.  But he also worried that it is causing schools to tilt too far toward entry hiring, and away from laterals, because the new entry-level candidates are so damn polished that they're likely to make laterals look a bit scruffy: 

Laterals candidates may be sitting at their office one day, get a call, and then may be giving a job talk in a few weeks that they have never given before or really thought through. It may be a decade or more since they went on the market or worried about these sorts of presentations. As a result, they'll tend to give much less polished presentations than entry-levels with VAP experience.

But the real meat of the dialogue surfaces in the comments.  Suzannah Sherry argues that the VAP trend hurts women in the market:

One problem with the VAP/fellowship route is that it tends to disadvantage women. It requires two changes in location rather than one, and in my experience more men than women are willing or able to make that double move. Some men, but few women, have stay-at-home or working but non-career spouses who can move easily; even if both spouse have careers, women seem more willing to sacrifice for their spouse's academic career than men are. If kids are involved, women -- again in my experience -- are less likely than men to disrupt their children's lives for their own careers. 

It seems to me that there are multiple issues embedded here.  First, to what degree do people who enter the market have children?  I suspect that all parents are reticent to move for a year or two.   Perhaps dads care less about disrupting the kids, maybe they're less sensitive to the qualitative distinctions between day care providers, or maybe they are simply less likely to bear the costs of a bad transition for kids.  I don't know.  This leads me to wonder whether it's more a parent thing than a mom thing.  Put another way, are moms more likely to disrupt their childrens' lives for their husband's career than they are for their own? 

Second, how many people entering the market have significant partners?  My anecdotal sense is that most do - and the question then is whether men with female partners are either a) more likely to leave their partners for a year or two to pursue a new career; or b) more likely to push their partner to give up their current gig for a temporary move. 

At the end of the day, and for better or worse, the academic life - outside of law, at least - has always involved these disruptions.   If you decide to become (or partner with)  a freshly minted sociologist, you kinda know that you'll be spending some time in Starkville and Ft. Collins, before you land in Bloomington-Normal.   This is now becoming more common for law professors.  The change may be particularly disruptive  because it is undermining prior expectations about how easy it is to find stable, permanent work in law teaching.  The average 2003 Harvard Law graduate who hoped to teach may not have expected the entry costs would be so high. 

Is this new reality worse for women?  Perhaps - in much the same way academia has been generally tough.  Interested readers may want to take a look at the anthology, Parenting and Professing: Family Work with an Academic Career, edited by Rachel Hile Bassett.

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on March 27, 2009 (boomark / email).