I’m curious how that could possibly be the case…

You said in another comment that you were both making $45k. According to this table from the IRS you would each be paying $3,743 as single filers and $7,483 filling jointly. That adds up to a $3 savings when you get married. Not too mention a $6k difference is 80% of the total taxes owed so it would be wild to see that big of a variation caused by filling jointly.

Perhaps there was some tax break or credit you got when you were single that you lost when you got married? In that case, couldn’t you just file your taxes separately if there really was a significant difference from filing jointly?

Hilariously enough, the co-author quoted in this article co-authored over 70 papers in 2023. That’s well above the 60 paper/year metric they are using to determine what qualifies as “extremely productive”.

While I agree that academia puts far too much emphasis on quantity of publications rather than quality, this is a mind-numbing level of hypocrisy.