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At Quite Prestigious Institution (QPI) I know well, there was a postdoc who was hired (with, I believe, an extra year) without having any publications. It was evidently widely agreed that this person was brilliant and would do great work, but just hadn’t written things up yet.
Teaching and outreach? Not really this person’s priority. Now, I do not know this person’s work well enough to make a judgment, and far be it from me to say that departments shouldn’t take chances on people.
But I think that every mathematician reading this has a pretty good guess about the race and gender of this person, and only giving certain kinds of people the benefit of the doubt is pretty much the definition of unearned privilege.
I remember this and compare the BIPOC women I know in mathematics for whom there is buckets of evidence that they are exceptional at research AND teaching AND changing the profession and yet who still get told in subtle and extremely blatant ways that they don’t belong in math.
But if you ask, QPI thinks they hire based on merit.
(If you follow me you probably know what thread—more precisely, what thread’s responses—this is inspired by. I’m choosing not to tag the author not because I think they don't deserve acknowledgement but because I don’t want to be the cause of more nastiness going their way.)
