I don’t understand the American belief that sexual intercourse makes people absorb the professional skills of their partners. I’ve spent twenty years being weirded out by “spousal hires” in every area of life. Everybody is discussing how jobs were granted based on DEI characteristics but it never gets mentioned how many of these jobs went to wives, then to mistresses, and then increasingly to throuple partners.
There’s a lot of this in academia but it also exists in politics where every Hillary and Michelle get inflicted on the public in perpetuity for no reason I can comprehend. Now there’s Erika Kirk who is destroying TPUSA not for any conspiratorial reason but simply because she has no idea how to run a large organization. The spectacle of her flailing is sad and utterly unnecessary.
It’s paradoxical that TPUSA, of all organizations, should prove so incapable of hiring based on merit.
Clarissa's Blog 
I can’t comment on why it happens in Academia, but I can explain why it happens for small businesses.
It basically boils down to two things. Trust and Money. When you are running a company, you need to be able to trust your workers or assistants, weather it be to actually show up, to not steal any checks that come in, etc. A spouse or a family member is generally considered more trustworthy than some random stranger. Especially now when our high trust societies have been destroyed.
I can likely trust my wife, my kid, my cousin, etc. not to screw me over. However I can’t trust my random employee without them having worked for me for a few years showing that I can. Like I said, no longer a high trust society. These things have consequences.
The Money aspect is also important. This comes from two directions. The first is typically new companies that haven’t made it yet, or a company that is on its last legs. Neither group would have the cash to really hire someone competent. Salaries are typically the biggest expenditures a company has. So if there isn’t enough money, a lot of time family is the only one that you can hire that is trustworthy. (There’s that Low Trust Society consequences striking again.)
The other direction is that your company might be making money and you have an available position. If you have a family member who needs a job, or you need something to keep your wife busy, you give it to them. The government can call it nepotism all they want, frankly I have long sense ceased to care what they think. Those idiots tried to erase the people group this nation was built off of, so they can get wrecked.
The last reason is sex. I think most guys would be willing to admit, that they have at least toyed with the idea that if they ever owned a company, they would like their wife or girlfriend in the role of a secretary for fun office times. Is it practical? No, not even slightly. But its a piece of fantasy that most guys have at least once, and likely some attempt it. I wish them well, but I doubt it ever really ends well.
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An individual small business is not a matter of public interest and should absolutely be run the way the owners want. I have no beef with that. But large complicated institutions deserve better than some bumblings woman who has no idea what she’s doing.
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Well Kid, we ran a small business for more than 40 years, I could not have done it without my wife. She managed the office, not only handled the book keeping, but issued the cheques. And frankly, her quiet(mostly) saintly patience with the seemingly endless federal and provincial government make-work job paperwork were absolutely necessary ;-D
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Of course, family businesses hire family members, as well they should. But universities? We once had a Dean who forced us to give a job to his wife and it was horrifying because she’d start drama and then report the details to the Dean. It was horrible. People were afraid to say anything to each other because she’d be there listening. More importantly, she was hired without any process, bypassing people who were actually qualified.
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It is not just Academia, much(most?) of the public service hiring in Canada has largely been corrupt for at least two generations. DEI is not something new, that is just the latest term to camoflauge discrimination.
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