Career success of Couples

Posted on May 17, 2024 by Martin Hahn, One of Thousands of Career Coaches on Noomii.

One of the interesting ways in which analysis of the two-career couple contributes to the wider body of career theory is that any comparison of two careers immediately raises the issue of what is success. One career can be studied within that person’s own frame of reference, within her or his own definition of success. But when two careers in an intimate relationship are being considered, comparisons are implicit in the multiple-role relationships that impinge upon the two-career couple: that is, each member of the couple opposite each other, external perceptions (and evaluations) of the two careers, external perceptions of the relationship, external perceptions of the couple’s parenting behavior, the couple’s perception of their relationship, the couple’s perception of their parenting behavior, and so on. Questions of frame of reference, of criteria of success, become extremely complex.

For the two-career couple, the issue of defining success must be raised in a serious way. Progress against an organizational or a cultural timetable for upward mobility is only one of the multiple criteria that are relevant here, either for the couple or for an external observer. In relation to women, more internal, less linear models of success must be given greater weight.

Since so few models of satisfactory two-career couples are available, even today, in striving for psychological success, the couple will often engage in self-designing careers or the protean career.

Thus, a critical feature of the two-career relationship is the complexity of the outcomes being sought. Everyone is concerned about juggling a work life, a personal life, a family life, a leisure life, a home, and other facets of living, not just members of two-career couples. This fact needs greater “play” in the theories of careers.

The ubiquitous two-career couple

The following significant trends in the demographics of the labor force speak eloquently for the need for career theory to incorporate work-family linkages. About forty-seven million persons in the work force are spouses in working-couple households; the proportion of women in the labor force has increased from one-third in 1950 to one-half now.

The percentage of managerial and professional women in the work force has increased from 33.9% in 1970 to 40.6% in 1980, while that of managerial and professional men declined from 66.11 to 59.4% during the same period. Since 1970, nearly half of the increase in the women in the labor force has been among women aged twenty-five to thirty-four, and the percentage of working women with children under six has increased from twelve in 1950 to fifty-two in 1984; the expected work life span of an average twenty-year-old woman increased from fourteen years in 1950 to twenty-six years in 1977, and the average working woman is expected to have at least thirty to thirty-five active years of life starting from a mid-career point in the future; and by 1990, 70–80% of women are expected to be in the labor force.

Not only are more women entering the labor force with intentions of staying there longer, but young women planning careers still contemplate marriage as a significant event in their lives. The majority of these women plan on having children, though they may consider postponing both their marriages and motherhood beyond their early adult years. This implies that there will be a continued increase in the number of dual-career families. It follows, then, that the currently experienced stresses from role overload (stresses from taking on multiple roles), identity diffusion (brought about by cultural expectations of sex role conformities), and role cycling dilemmas (the conflict of wanting to start a family but not wanting to compromise career advancement) will continue to be experienced by the dual-career couple until such time as new structures are evolved by society and organizations to alleviate the tensions presently experienced by the couples. The current stresses bring in their wake frustrations, feelings of competition between the spouses, and other dysfunctional consequences for the partners. As a result, productivity for the organization is compromised.

Spouses’ attitudes and behavior

Much of the research on two-career couples has centered on the attitudes and behaviors of the two parties in the relationship. A major issue for the couple is the large number of roles to be managed: wife or husband, parent, careerist, self, friend, son or daughter, home manager, and so on. With both spouses working outside the home for the major part of the day, the couple often experiences the home as lacking a homemaker (i.e., a person whose primary responsibility is managing the home). Thus, the critical question is, who does the various home tasks, and what attitude does each partner have toward the two careers, the home, the children, and their other role senders.

Earlier research tended to focus more on attitudes than on behaviors. The findings often indicated that, while there might be high commitment to both careers, at decision times when the two came into direct conflict (e.g., when offered a promotion requiring relocation) the husband’s career usually took priority.

The degree of mutual commitment to both careers and to family was found to be a strong correlate of marital happiness, and often family was required to make accommodations to career.

Four different types of couples are identified based upon the parties’ involvement in home and career: accommodators (each party highly involved in a different sphere), allies (both involved in the same sphere and not concerned with perfection in the other), adversaries (each highly involved in work but wanting the other to do home tasks), and acrobats (each highly involved in both home and work). It is hypothesized that the highest levels of stress would be felt by the acrobats in the process of trying to “have it all.” Next would come the competitive adversaries. Because of their more compatible expectations, allies and accommodators were hypothesized to have lower levels of stress. When behavior, as opposed to attitude, has been studied, it has been clear

from the earliest research to more recent work that women put in more time than men on home and parenting activities. However, only a few women felt that their husbands were not doing enough in the home; the data indicate that the women did not expect a completely equal sharing of home tasks. Husbands performed more family activities when the wife’s job required long hours at work, travel, and overtime.

Boundary differences between spouses

A more recent area of work has been how the two spouses perceive the psychological, temporal, and physical overlaps between the work and family domains. One important issue here is behavioral and attitudinal spillover, as identified by from work into home life. A recurring theme in this area of research has been that work usually takes priority over home. Much of this boundary research has examined sources of conflict between roles in the work and home domains. In an analysis of the 1977 Quality of Employment Survey data, it was found that 34% of the men studied felt that work and family interfered with each other. Theoretical models that spell out conditions under which career-home role conflict might lead to experienced stress have been proposed. The important distinction between time pressures (role overload) and intrinsic conflict or spillover between roles (role conflict).