Using a national survey of 508 art history Ph.D.s including data on graduate school performance and careers 10 – 15 years post-Ph.D., this study investigates gender, family, and academic tenure in art history, the humanities field with the highest proportion of women. Alternative hypotheses derived from three perspectives—termed here clockwork, two-body, and synergy—are evaluated with multivariate logistic regression. Analysis finds that marriage increases men’s tenure odds and decreases women’s, but that some types of marriages do not decrease women’s odds, and some types dramatically increase men’s. This study calls attention to male advantage in female-dominated academic disciplines and demonstrates the potential to better understand the interactions of gender, marriage, and careers by conceptualizing different types of marriages. Studies of gender inequality in academia largely ignore disciplines in which women predominate; researchers have concentrated on science and engineering fields in which women are grossly underrepresented (Long, 2001). Yet significant
