Meh. You know my thoughts on this. Perhaps I was not short listed (and therefore never interviewed) because of “name brand” bias against my doctoral degree granting institution, but I can only recall two instances (and Chris will correct me if I misremember) where…if I were interviewed…I didn’t get the job. And I interviewed for, and was offered, a significant number of (admittedly non top-tier…some non eighth tier) jobs over 2 years of searching.

And “stellar” is not a word generally used to describe my scholarship or personal charisma.

For one of those I wasn’t offered, the department voted to offer me the job (and phoned to tell me so) but the dean reversed their decision. I believe it went to another male cracker. I am pretty sure that the dean reversed the decision because she had also grown up in North Carolina and knew darn well I was lying when I said I would be happy to live and stay in Massachusetts.

The only other job (to my memory) I wasn’t offered was when I was pretending to be a pub admin guy for a job at a school and location I REALLLLY wanted. It also went to a fellow male cracker.

Is my case anecdotal? yes…but so are Leopold Stotch’s examples.

As we all know, the plural of anecdotes is data. ☺

For what it’s worth, I have a sense that there’s a lot of quota-filling that goes on in the discipline (explicit or tacit), but in our mutual sub(sub)field that doesn’t seem to happen much—most minority behaviorists seem to pigeon-hole themselves as minority politics scholars and compete for those jobs instead, and there aren’t that many women in the subfield to begin with, so they’re snapped up before we even get down to our part of the academic food chain.

Anyway, gotta teach…