At the end of last year, my lab manager went into extended, part-time maternity leave for all of 2023 so that I needed to find a temporary replacement for her for the afternoons. The historical, first step in such cases was always to ask around the department to see if there was someone else who was qualified and on a part-time contract and wanted to stock up for a short time.
And you know what? It all worked out pretty damn good in most cases. The search was simplified and both sides knew pretty much what they were getting (or getting themselves into), part of which was a person who was already in the building and knew all the twisted ropes that this particular department and university had on offer. And, don’t forget, we’re talking about a part-time, temporary position here and so weren’t really doing a great injustice to anyone on the outside.
However, after having found just such a person in our department, I was told that the position, despite being part-time and temporary, still had to be advertised officially to maintain accountability. The University of Not-Bielefeld is, after all, a public institution that is funded by public money (but is, strangely enough, still private property) and the taxpayer has the right to know that their money is being used responsibly. Exactly like when public money is used to bail out private businesses because their unaccountable actions mean that they aren’t making enough profit anymore.
Anyway …
In Act I, I had to form an official hiring committee so I quickly tapped three people from my working group, which is about the minimum number I could get away with. Additionally included as observers on this committee, however, were one member each from the departmental office, the faculty’s equal-opportunities office, the university’s employee council, and, potentially, the university’s equal-opportunities office.
Now this is not to imply that the equal-opportunities offices of the faculty and the university don’t communicate with or trust one another. They just target different minorities is all: women at the faculty level and persons with disabilities at the university one. (I have no idea what politically-correct terminology has against adjectives. Seriously! Beside the extra, convoluting syllables, what is the honest-to-goodness difference between “disabled person” and “person with disabilities”? If anything, the latter implies that the person has more than one disability. And why are adjectives only outlawed for minorities? For instance, no one would ever refer to me, a white male, as a person with underpigmentation and heterozygous sex chromosomes. Seems to me that adjectives should sue for discrimination here …)
At least the university office admits their narrower scope because German name for the officer in charge (SchwerbehindertenbeauftragterIn) clearly indicates the focus on people with disabilities. This isn’t the case for the faculty’s Gleichstellung office, the name of which literally translates out to “equal opportunity” (which is also the English translation that the university uses), but the practical remit of which doesn’t extend beyond women.
You want to hire disproportionately more women? That’s cool. Women have been on the short end of the academic stick (and many others) for far too long. Just call it what it is. (And please don’t call it “positive discrimination”, which is simply moronic because it’s needlessly oxymoronic. Discrimination is negative. Period. So don’t try to be clever and try to make it something positive especially when other, better, and more direct phrases for it like “equal opportunity” or “affirmative action” already exist. Imagine the outcry if you tried the same trick with the word “racism” (which is actually just a subset of discrimination, BTW) …) For instance, our departmental office, which has been 100% female for about a decade now, once had to fight with the faculty “Gleichstellung” office to have a phrase included for an open, secretarial position they had that men, the minority gender in this case, were specifically encouraged to apply. And the “Gleichstellung” officer? Has to be female according to the University’s (almost definitely illegal) regulations and is elected at a meeting to which only women can attend. Gleichstellung has never looked so ungleich before …
And then comes Act II …
The position was then advertised through the personnel department on the university’s web pages and, after all was said and done, there was one whole applicant: the same woman I had head-hunted a few weeks earlier and had informed about the advertisement. Everyone else seems to have somehow overlooked the ad despite it running for an entire two weeks (the official minimum) from December 14th to 28th. Curious …
And then came the motions in Act III …
First a meeting to decide on a shortlist (and if one isn’t a short list then I don’t know what is), then another meeting where the candidate was interviewed by the committee, and finally a meeting where the committee made a recommendation of who to hire. And then the obligatory paperwork: minutes of each of the “meetings”, a form indicating the “Gleichstellung” measures, and finally a form to hire the preferred candidate. Annoyingly, most of these forms asked for the exact same information such that they could have been combined into one with copies sent around as needed. More curiously, although all the forms allowed the applicants for the position to be non-binary, the same was not true for members of the hiring committee who had to be either male or female. And this on the “Gleichstellung” form of all things! So non-binary people apparently either have to choose their gender upon being hired by the University of Not-Bielefeld or don’t get to sit on any hiring committees.
In the end, the one lingering question to this three-act charade is where the much ballyhooed accountability was. There was a lot of talk—and a lot more bureaucracy—but little to no real action.
Let’s be honest: the result with all the “accountability” was exactly the same as the one I would have gotten otherwise. Both the hiring committee and the advertisement (especially the timing of it) were just this side of illegitimate. And all the other control mechanisms were largely no-shows as well. I’ll give the university equal-opportunity office a pass here because there were no candidates with disabilities so their input wasn’t needed. The same goes for the departmental office, which had actually done their work already in letting me know beforehand what the legal requirements for the process were. But, the faculty “Gleichstellung” office politely jumped ship before anything got rolling and I only ever heard back from the employee council twice, both times saying on short notice that they wouldn’t be able to attend the meetings where the important decisions (making the shortlist and who to hire) were being made. For the employee council they at least admitted that it was because of a shortage of Homo-sapiens power and the same was probably true for the faculty “Gleichstellung” office as well.
But if you’re going to make other people jump through hoops for you, then at least have the decency to be there in person to hold the damn hoops and not just reserve the right to veto any decision afterwards that you could’ve actively been a part of beforehand.
If you can’t, then maybe those hoops weren’t all that important in the first place now were they?
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