How do you get an academic job in this field? Good question. Standard answers include hard work, intelligence, luck, and important and interesting field or analytical work. Common knowledge also has it that job success is largely correlated with the prestige of your department, or perhaps more specifically, that of your advisor. Some have speculated on other potential determinants, such as gender. You may recall the paper by Barbara Stark and coauthors we published last year. [SAA Bulletin 15(4):6-9]. Among its conclusions was that women are not being hired in proportion to the numbers of Ph.D. recipients. Scott Hutson of Berkeley addresses both these questions in a very interesting paper in this issue. He shows that while prestige does matter, many departments seen as the most prestigious have had relatively little success in moving their graduates into academic positions. He also examines gender biases in hiring, and his findings suggest that while the climate for women in archaeology continues to be chilly, the situation is more complex than is commonly imagined and that data beyond surveys are required to gain deeper insight into the origins and effects of gender bias in archaeology.