Even the people who would never say anything related to personal lives in the interview context can slip up because we convolute social interactions with the interview,” says enzymologist Carol Fierke at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, who is also a graduate school dean and a vice provost for academic affairs.

You have to make your decisions based on facts. That’s a really important thing,” says Allen. “When someone on my committee says, ‘This guy is great!’ I ask, ‘Can you please explain why he is great? What makes him great? Is it the number of publications? Is it the proposal? Is it the area that he is suggesting working in?’” It’s not all casual Jessi Bennion, Political Science Outstanding Teaching Award for Teaching Excellence That Serves MSU's Land Grant Mission Catherine is a postdoctoral fellow with an NIH career-transition award who asked that her real name not to be used. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in the same department as Lieb but under a different adviser. Butler, Judith. 2004a. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London and New York: Verso. Butler, Judith, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek. 2000. Contingency, Hegemony and Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. London and New York: Verso.Butler, Judith. 1995. “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism’.” In Feminist Contentions: A philosophical Exchange, edited by Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, and Nancy Fraser, 35–58. New York: Routledge. His debut video Disney will always be life! earned him fame initially. Through his videos, Zach likes to give real, brutal, and honest opinions on various topics while adding comedy to them. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics

Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. New York and London: Routledge. Herstein, Ori J. 2010. “Justifying Subversion: Why Nussbaum Got (the Better Interpretation of) Butler Wrong.” Buffalo Journal of Gender, Law & Social Policy 18: 43–73. Butler, Judith. 2012. Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism. New York: Columbia University Press.Brenner and William Guggino, the chairman of the physiology department at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine say that at the subsequent stages of the interview process, if the candidate is still in the running, they shift into courting mode and try to woo the candidate. The heads of departments need to know if there is anything they need to do to make potential new hires feel welcome. To find out what a new recruit needs, say the department heads, the most logical thing to do is to ask an open-ended question. Panel chairs often fail to paint the picture of a competent professional, instead lingering much longer than in the case of male speakers on the women’s physical attributes, age, country of upbringing, family situation and so on. Even well-meaning, jovial endorsements of a woman’s nonprofessional attributes —“how nice to see X, Y, Z in a discussion of such a serious topic”— can be distracting at best. At worst, such comments outright undermine the speaker.

We asked people who withdrew from (job) searches before or after an offer was made and found that women were likely to do so because they had been asked these questions,” says Abigail Stewart, a professor of psychology and women’s studies at the University of Michigan. She was the senior author on the JAMA paper and the director of the university’s ADVANCE program. She also urges people to think deeply about why they like a particular candidate and to make sure they are not resorting to assumptions and stereotypes. In May, a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported results from a survey of people who had received NIH career-transition awards between 2006 and 2009. Of the 1,066 respondents, 22 percent of the men reported perceiving or experiencing gender bias in their careers. In contrast, 70 percent of the women did. During a recruiting visit at another university, Deborah attended a dinner with several people, including the chairman of the search committee and a woman from the department head’s laboratory. Deborah recalls quietly listening to the conversation about their families. When there was a pause, “the woman turned to me and said, ‘Based on our conversation, I take it you don’t have children,’” Deborah says. “I looked around, expecting someone to change the subject, but everyone was staring and waiting for my answer.” Salih, Sara. 2003. “Judith Butler and the Ethics of ‘difficulty’.” Critical Quarterly 45 (3): 42–51.Put on the spot, Deborah says, she felt obligated to reveal that she didn’t have children. “It was very awkward,” she says. “I was hoping someone was going to fish me out of that situation, but that never happened.” Rushing says there are about 20 kids in the children’s program, while the church itself sees between 120 and 150 attending on Sunday mornings. Candidates and hiring managers interviewed for this article report that the illegal and inappropriate questions tend to come up during the social moments of campus interviews, such as meals and receptions. Candidates know that anything they say at any time could get noted in their applications. But social events during recruitment visits are intentionally more casual than sit-down interviews, and faculty members often ask personal questions as they might at gatherings without job candidates. The speech-and-thought-bubble approach “seems to be much more successful,” notes Fierke. She says the approach allows people to understand that the questions about marital status or children, no matter how they are presented, aren’t perceived the same way by the candidate. Those questions tend to mar the candidate’s experience with the department, and the result can be “a de-recruitment,” says Fierke.