More important, "Catch Me," with its combination of Spielberg at the helm and Tom Hanks as co-star, is the perfect career insurance policy.
But even in the United States, the range is limited: "About 20% of American universities have a dual-career policy, but half of them take an informal approach," says Maersi Nerad from the University of Washington, Seattle, an expert in this field.
Their policies make explicit the necessity of reviewing the experiences and backgrounds of all potential hires, including those introduced through a dual-career policy, and having the faculty and administrators involved vote on whether the candidate meets the criteria necessary for the position.
The participants included academics from a range of disciplines (including UK-based and international experts in the fields of ethnicity and social gerontology and those at various stages of their research careers), policy makers, health and social care practitioners, commissioners of services, and those working in the voluntary and statutory sectors.
If universities want to recruit highly qualified scientists, they need to develop dual-career policies, all interviewed junior scientists said.
An important characteristic of institutions with successful dual-career policies is that they have made little of the problems and, instead, focused on the possibilities.
Institutions that have successful dual-career policies believe that they are fair, and they often deal with questions about fairness by adopting a clear policy and carrying it out t openly and evenly.
Our findings were somewhat at odds with those of others who have concluded that dual-career policies do, indeed, help recruit minority faculty members (Loeb, 1997; Smith et al., 1996).
Institutions with dual-career policies insist that the only way to make such accommodations viable from an institutional standpoint is to ensure that those doing the hiring pay careful attention to quality.
Commentary on the subject of the "two-body problem"—the issue of finding work for the professionally qualified partner of a sought-after academic usually focuses on universities' dual-career policies or applicants' tactics for negotiating the hire.
