The negotiation in the era of the dual career couple

At the Harvard Business Review’s recent centennial, Editor-in-Chief Adi Ignatius rummaged through the archives and found, among other things, a 1956 article titled “Successful Wives of Successful Executives.”

“It is the wife’s job to cooperate in achieving the goals set by her husband,” the article stated. “That means accepting—or perhaps encouraging—the business trips, long hours at the office, and house moves that her career dictates.”

It got worse. The husband, the piece continued, “may meet someone who conforms more closely to the new social norms he acquired as he moved upwards socially; she can abandon a wife by taking a new one or by concentrating all his attention on his affairs of hers”. How disgusting.

The dual-career couple’s rise has transformed marriage politics since the 1950s, but some tensions remain. A recently published book states: “The most important career decision you will make is who to marry and what kind of relationship you will have.”

Words appear in “Money and Love: An Intelligent Road Map to Life’s Biggest Decisions,” written by Myra Strober, a professor emerita at Stanford University, and Abby Davisson, a former executive at retailer Gap, and now a consultant.

The book takes a both/and rather than an either-or approach to issues surrounding professional and home life. The authors reject an artificial notion of “equilibrium”. Instead there are necessary, stubborn but human compromises. “If you want lives that aren’t just two individuals pursuing career aspirations separately, then it takes a lot of negotiation, a lot of discussion and compromise,” Davisson explained when I met with the authors in London.

Strober taught a class called “work and family” at the Stanford Graduate School of Business (SGSB) for several decades, until her retirement in 2018. She was one of the first women on the faculty at her tenure in the early ‘ 70.

“If I had proposed that my business school class be called ‘money and love’ instead of ‘work and family’ I would have gotten some pushback,” she told me. But wasn’t this in California in the days after the “Summer of Love”? “Even then the business school didn’t buy it!” she noticed.

Perhaps inevitably, in a book written by a professor and business school graduate, there is a checklist or framework to help the reader make better life decisions. These are the five Cs: Clarify what’s important; communicate effectively with a partner (or potential partner); consider a wide range of choices, avoiding crude decisions or/or; check in with a sounding board of friends and family; and to explore the likely short- and long-term consequences of any major decision.

Actions will count as much as the thought processes that precede them.

Davisson said, “The mental models we have, particularly from our parents, are incredibly powerful.” If you don’t see what an equal partnership looks like in your home, she added, it might be hard to picture one.

“I have two boys,” she said, “and they see my husband as head chef. They think it’s fun when I cook. . . They’re going to have this model of us sharing the workload. All household responsibilities do not fall to just one person.

During the Covid pandemic, employees, parents and caregivers have mixed their roles as they work from home and try to keep family life going. For some this was an opportunity to more evenly share the domestic workload, for others it made it more difficult to achieve the fabled work-life balance.

The authors say more is needed. “We need to invest in excellent childcare,” Strober said. “This is something business leaders need to think about.” Davisson added, “We see birth rates going down, people don’t want to finance the cost, and then we wonder why people aren’t having more children.”

Although Strober’s course was highly regarded by the students – with men, incidentally, making up 40% of the participants – SGSB chose not to continue it after his retirement.

This risks the business school becoming too focused on money and how to get it, without thinking about the human factor.

Strober knows that split all too well. He cites two books by 18th-century philosopher Adam Smith: The Wealth of Nations, which concerns the free market and the functioning of the economy; AND The theory of moral sentiments, which focuses on social cohesion and relationships.

“Most people just know about The Wealth of Nations,” said Strober. “It’s a shame he separated those two books. Had he mixed the discussion of wealth with the discussion of altruism, we might not be so separate on them.

We need both money and love. “Money isn’t worth having unless you also have love,” Davisson said. And Strober’s latest tip? “The trick is to find someone who is your life partner who has the same philosophy as you.”