EP69: What Working Couples Need To Know To Make It Work

Interview with Jaclyn Wong / Expert on Career, Relationship & Family Decisions

HOSTED BY PAUL SULLIVAN

Balancing the competing pressures of modern work and caregiving roles is hard for everyone. Professional couples fall into three categories that may not be good for them long term. Consistent compromises. Autonomous actors. Tending traditional couples. Learn what each one means for you and also understand how far you can go to change this dynamic when there are structural and cultural issues aligned against couples switching up roles.

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Transcript

00;00;05;19 - 00;00;26;14
Paul Sullivan
Welcome to the Company Dad podcast, where we explore the sweet, silly, strange and sublime aspects of being a dad in a world where men are the go to parent, aren't always accepted at work, among their friends, or in the community for what they're doing. I'm your host, Paul Sullivan. Our podcast is just one of the many things we produce each week at the Company of Dads.

00;00;26;15 - 00;00;55;26
Paul Sullivan
We have various features, including the lead dad of the week. We have our community both online and in person, and the one stop shop for all of this is our newsletter. The dad to sign up at the company does.com backslash the dad. That's the company of dads.com backslash the dad. Now today my guest is Jaclyn Wong, an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and a faculty affiliate in the Women's and Gender Studies department at the University of South Carolina.

00;00;55;28 - 00;01;07;11
Paul Sullivan
We're going to talk about her new book, Equal Partners How Dual Professional Couples Make Career, relationship, and Family Decisions. Welcome, Jaclyn, to the Company Desk Podcast.

00;01;07;14 - 00;01;10;13
Jaclyn Wong
Hi. Thank you for having me.

00;01;10;15 - 00;01;20;10
Paul Sullivan
To begin studying this area long before, you know, you decided the topic, of your book. How do you come about studying the area? They say.

00;01;20;13 - 00;01;45;25
Jaclyn Wong
This project actually started with an observation that I made as I was graduating from college over ten years ago. I noticed that some of the women who I was friends with, who are graduating alongside me, decided to move wherever their boyfriends had gotten jobs. The women themselves did not have jobs lined up for themselves, nor did they have social networks in those places.

00;01;45;25 - 00;02;06;20
Jaclyn Wong
And they thought that they would figure it out when they got there. And to be honest, I was a little worried about them. Right? I had another friend who was a man who made a different decision. So he broke up with his girlfriend at the time because her professional plans after graduation did not line up with his career plans.

00;02;06;20 - 00;02;36;16
Jaclyn Wong
Or so he told me. You know, as I kept talking to him about it, I learned that he hadn't really explored or done any research on whether or not he would be able to launch his career in the city where she was going to, start her career. And I was just really wondering if there were broader social forces, playing a role in my friends lives, because here I was about to go to graduate school for a PhD in sociology.

00;02;36;17 - 00;02;46;29
Jaclyn Wong
Being someone who's interested in gender inequality and issues of work and family. So I decided to, more systematically explore these ideas rather than just observe my friends.

00;02;47;01 - 00;02;59;22
Paul Sullivan
Sure. But I'll start with observation, you know, sort of pique your curiosity. Were they moving to, obscure places, or were they moving to big cities like Chicago, New York, Washington, D.C., or.

00;02;59;25 - 00;03;27;17
Jaclyn Wong
No, they were not big cities, right? So they were moving to, you know, places in, like Indiana, places in Maryland, but not the D.C. area. And and I'm from I'm from California. We were kind of West Coast based, and, you know, it just feels far. And not know anybody and not really know anything about the area that you're going to share.

00;03;27;17 - 00;03;43;08
Paul Sullivan
It also makes sense if you sort of, wherever you are in the United States or in the world, you plunk yourself down in New York City. Chances are, you'll you'll find something if you plunk yourself down somewhere else. There may not be that, there may be something, but it may not be the something that you you really want to do.

00;03;43;15 - 00;03;59;21
Paul Sullivan
Well, and why do you think you know? Did you ever delve in with this, this one guy who who sort of went the other way and did the research? Did you ever. I mean, you're young, you're 22, you graduate from college. But did it ever you know, obviously that that story stuck with you. What do you think it was about him?

00;03;59;24 - 00;04;04;04
Paul Sullivan
That allowed him to make a different choice?

00;04;04;06 - 00;04;31;14
Jaclyn Wong
Yeah, I definitely think that there are kind of different cultural pressures that men and women face when it comes to making trade offs between in your career and your relationship, where it might be a little bit more acceptable and maybe, perhaps expected for women to prioritize their romantic relationships and, you know, kind of families and partners, a little more so than their careers.

00;04;31;14 - 00;04;46;22
Jaclyn Wong
But for men, the expectation is to prioritize your career and not not to kind of pursue a relationship if it is going to get in the way of your career. So that is that is my speculation around what I think was going on.

00;04;46;25 - 00;05;07;06
Paul Sullivan
So, you know, you finish college, you go right after graduate school. I finish, college, years and years, years before you, but went to the same exact graduate school, the university of Chicago, where fun goes to die. And, it's a wonderful motto that they have, but, you know, you show up, and I know, you know, from personal experience, a bit of a grind to get there.

00;05;07;06 - 00;05;28;25
Paul Sullivan
Everyone's really smart. They've done while other places, and you start taking your courses. But this idea sticks with you. It comes, you know, time to. So do you know, perhaps research for a master's thesis? You know, perhaps you're thinking about your your dissertation when you start doing this, this research into what becomes, you know, equal partners. What did you expect to find?

00;05;28;25 - 00;05;38;07
Paul Sullivan
They did you have a hypothesis as to what you expected to find versus, you know, the next one was going to be what you actually found, but what did you expect to find as you embarked on this research?

00;05;38;10 - 00;06;14;09
Jaclyn Wong
Yeah, when I started the research, it was actually for my master's thesis, and I thought that if it went well, then it could be the foundation for a dissertation. And, you know, I feel really happy that it's now a book. Obviously. I, I hypothesize that, the kind of cohort of men and women that I was hoping to study would take more gender egalitarian pathways into work and family than their predecessors.

00;06;14;10 - 00;06;53;04
Jaclyn Wong
So I was doing a lot of reading on what exists in the literature and the kind of common refrain is that when there are two careers that couples are trying to negotiate and balance and navigate together, women and kind of consistently pull back, on their careers, and kind of allow men to pursue theirs 100%. And I didn't I didn't think that that was what I was going to see in the group of young adults that I was hoping to study.

00;06;53;08 - 00;07;24;05
Jaclyn Wong
So I purposefully tried to study people who were graduating from professional and graduate degree programs. So these are people who are going to be lawyers. They're going to be doctors. You know, they're they're getting their master's in public policy, hoping to work in government. So these people are really invested in having a career, they potentially grew up, following kind of second wave feminism, where many of these men and women's owned mothers worked and participated in the workforce.

00;07;24;05 - 00;07;45;09
Jaclyn Wong
So it was not weird or strange that a woman might pursue a career and that men would be supportive of it. And so I, I was thinking that I would see, some more gender equal couples, and I think I did see that, but I think I also found some things that were very surprising in my study.

00;07;45;11 - 00;08;03;25
Paul Sullivan
Yeah, well, we're going to go into it, but it's interest because yeah, they've invested their time. They've invested, money. You know, so sometimes you get a stipend or something, you get a fellowship for a program like this. Sometimes you don't. Sometimes if you go to law school, it's, you know, medical school. I mean, it's hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of of debt.

00;08;03;27 - 00;08;37;18
Paul Sullivan
And so all the couples that you focused on were is it fair to say, at the beginning of their careers, like in their 20s, that right into you trying to, you know, kind of almost like a fresh slate. They've been influenced there. And you picked 21, pair, 21 couples. How did you, select them? Because, you know, I know how this sausage is made here, but but maybe for the listener, you can't just pick, you know, 21 of your best friends and, call it a scientific study and go go from there.

00;08;37;18 - 00;08;50;22
Paul Sullivan
You have to have it be, representative. So, so talk through for for the listener how you identified this 21 couples to to have them be a representative sample for, for what you're hoping to learn here.

00;08;50;24 - 00;09;20;11
Jaclyn Wong
So in interview research, which is the type of research I did for this project, the aim is not necessarily to get representation in so far as equal proportions of, you know, men and women in these different programs. It's more about representation of key characteristics of the people that you think are going to influence the pathways into their careers and their families.

00;09;20;11 - 00;09;43;27
Jaclyn Wong
So let me kind of break that down a little bit more. Yeah. So I use a method called quota sampling, where I decided that in order to get a wide range of perspectives into my study, I need to make sure that I have representation of couples, where both partners are graduating from their programs and immediately searching for jobs.

00;09;43;29 - 00;10;07;11
Jaclyn Wong
I needed some couples where she was immediately graduating and immediately having the search for jobs, and he could be, you know, a little further down the line. Or maybe he is already a little bit established in his career. And then the other case would be couples in which he is graduating and making the immediate kind of career decision to launch his career.

00;10;07;11 - 00;10;31;08
Jaclyn Wong
And again, she could be someone who's a couple years behind or someone who's already a little bit established in her career. So by getting variation across the gender of the job seeker in these couples, I could really see how different social forces might be playing a role in the way that these couples experience the transition from school to work.

00;10;31;10 - 00;10;57;03
Jaclyn Wong
Depending on whether the leader of the job search is a man or a woman, right. So the expectation would be if gender is not playing a traditional role like we would expect, in couples where she's searching for a job, couples should follow her wherever she's going, right? And in couples where he's looking for a job, they're just going to go where he's going.

00;10;57;03 - 00;11;20;28
Jaclyn Wong
And in couples where both people are looking for jobs, they're going to go together and, you know, try to find something together. Yeah, but if but if gender is still playing a role, then if she's searching for a job, she might give up that search because wherever she's going might not make sense for him. Right. This is kind of echoing that pattern that I saw in my in my friend who was a man.

00;11;21;05 - 00;11;33;25
Jaclyn Wong
Right. And if gender is still playing a role, where men are the ones searching for jobs, she's going to fall low no matter what, no matter the cost to her own career. Right. And that's kind of echoing some of the things.

00;11;33;27 - 00;11;42;13
Paul Sullivan
All right. It's killing us. I yeah, I, I've had the book, but the idea that the listeners have it what do you find, what do you learn with these 21 couples.

00;11;42;16 - 00;12;06;25
Jaclyn Wong
So what I learned, is, is that the gender of the job seeker didn't matter in the way that I expected. And this is this is how you know, you're doing good research, right? Like you're not just finding things that kind of confirm what your hypotheses are, but what I, what I found was that couples follow three work family pathways, as I call them.

00;12;07;00 - 00;12;35;04
Jaclyn Wong
The one pathway is the consistent compromise or pathway, where men's and women's careers are equally prioritized the entire time that they're in the study, and men's and women's responsibilities at home are also equally shared. Then I have a group called the Tending traditional couples. Now, these are not gender traditional. Insofar as he works and she doesn't, it's just that his career is prioritized over hers.

00;12;35;04 - 00;13;01;25
Jaclyn Wong
She still might work, but she kind of takes whatever she can get, and his career is kind of the star. And then there is a pathway called the autonomous actors pathway. And this is a group of men and women who kind of each individually did their own thing next to each other. So these couples kind of said, you should do what's best for you, and I should do what's best for me.

00;13;01;25 - 00;13;11;14
Jaclyn Wong
And hopefully it will all work out for us. But, you know, that kind of creates some logistical burdens for somebody to take on.

00;13;11;17 - 00;13;17;05
Paul Sullivan
I should have asked for that. But these 21 couples, there are couples. But were they necessarily married?

00;13;17;07 - 00;13;18;08
Jaclyn Wong
No, they were not.

00;13;18;08 - 00;13;21;02
Paul Sullivan
They weren't. They had. Were any of them married?

00;13;21;04 - 00;13;36;23
Jaclyn Wong
Yes. I again use my quota sampling and purposefully chose to talk to a half married couples and half unmarried couples because I had a suspicion that married couples might function a little differently than not.

00;13;36;25 - 00;13;41;26
Paul Sullivan
Did that determine which of the three buckets that they fell into?

00;13;41;28 - 00;14;13;19
Jaclyn Wong
A little bit. So, I don't know if determine is the right word, but there was, an association between marital status and the work family pathways that they traveled. So the unmarried couples were much more likely to take the autonomous actors pathway. Maybe not so surprising, but, what was kind of interesting for me was that married couples were equally likely to be represented in the traditional couples pathway, as well as the consistent compromiser pathway.

00;14;13;22 - 00;14;41;28
Jaclyn Wong
And this goes against previous literature, because marriage is supposedly this conservative institution with strong gender norms about what men and women should do as husbands and as wives. But for some of the couples marriage really functioned as a promise to always prioritize both people's career pursuits, because that was what was important to each person. Rather than say, we're now married, we have to be traditional.

00;14;42;00 - 00;15;05;22
Paul Sullivan
Did you find, I know these are folks who are starting their careers, coming out of professional schools, but did you find that, if one of them, either the man or the woman, was a higher earner or was entering a, profession where they were hired, you talk about, you know, master's in public policy versus somebody who's, an attorney.

00;15;05;24 - 00;15;20;18
Paul Sullivan
You could see there would be, side disparity in the beginning, growing into probably a large disparity depending what the attorney did with his or her law degree. Did that income, have any, impact on the decisions that people made?

00;15;20;20 - 00;15;50;01
Jaclyn Wong
So I purposed I chose to talk to people who were graduating from their programs and not in their careers yet. Or like, you know, so early on in their careers that, you know, whatever their starting income was, was, you know, maybe not super high. So income was not a factor that people said influence their job decisions.

00;15;50;04 - 00;16;30;02
Jaclyn Wong
There I, I specifically tried to get couples where men and women had very similar earnings potential. So each person could be potentially earning a very high salary. And so those kinds of financial considerations, are less likely to play a role. And then I could more directly examine how then gender might be playing a role, because if she is getting, you know, a PhD in chemical engineering and thinks that she's going to work in pharmacy and pharmaceuticals, and he has a similar type of degree, and those jobs are equally high paying.

00;16;30;04 - 00;16;40;25
Jaclyn Wong
It's not really, you know, economically rational to say, well, we're going to prioritize his job or her job because both people are going to be earning, quite a lot of money.

00;16;40;27 - 00;17;00;13
Paul Sullivan
And, you know, since, you know, the approach she took, the them was this interview based, approach. When you talk to people about this over the, you know, six years of I got to remember that correctly, that you're doing the research and you pointed out to them, hey, you're an autonomous actor. Hey, you're consistently compromising. Hey, you're one of those couples.

00;17;00;13 - 00;17;11;09
Paul Sullivan
It's tending to be more traditional. What was the reaction that people had when you, you know, pointed out essentially what, what bucket they were, were trending toward.

00;17;11;12 - 00;17;36;24
Jaclyn Wong
So I didn't ever tell people, what pathway I thought that they were following, because it was important for me, as I was collecting data from them, that they were able to tell their own stories, right, with their own viewpoints, without any of my interpretation there. So certainly as an analyst, I am doing some work and mapping out patterns, you know, and charting people's trajectories.

00;17;36;26 - 00;17;47;23
Jaclyn Wong
But I would never, I would never counter what people had to tell me, even if they contradicted themselves, which many of them did.

00;17;47;26 - 00;18;12;05
Paul Sullivan
Okay, then let me ask a question in a different way. If you had two married couples where, you know, some were, you know, trending, traditional and some were the consistent, you know, compromise or what did you, as the research say? Here are some, you know, trends here. The people in this group, have told me they've made this decision for the following reasons.

00;18;12;05 - 00;18;19;16
Paul Sullivan
In the person. And people in this group have made their decision for these, these other reasons. What are some of those trends that you you noticed?

00;18;19;18 - 00;18;51;29
Jaclyn Wong
Yes. So, I use a framework that I invented called the Work Family Ecosystems Framework to analyze my data and to make sense of people's stories, to put them onto a trajectory. The Work Family Ecosystems framework says that it is the confluence of structural support, cultural support, and partners effectively collaborative action that can produce egalitarian work family pathways.

00;18;52;06 - 00;19;24;26
Jaclyn Wong
So what I mean by that is for for you to have structural support, you need to have a workplace that is family friendly, that, offers resources to allow you to have an equal partnership with your partner. For us to have cultural support, we need to see people expressing attitudes about gender equality rather than gender traditional attitudes, where, you know, he is the earner and she is staying at home and for coordinated action.

00;19;24;26 - 00;19;47;09
Jaclyn Wong
What we need to see is that partners are working together to share their resources with one another and to kind of leverage any kind of advantages that they might have in their situation to enable their own partner to participate in the workforce and at home as an equal partner. So the the thing here is, it's that all three of those pieces need to come together.

00;19;47;11 - 00;20;09;28
Jaclyn Wong
And that's incredibly difficult right in, in our current society. So what I did when I analyzed the data was for each couple I looked at what are the levels of structural support that they had access to versus what kinds of barriers did they face? Right. Did their workplaces say absolutely no, working from home. Right. Did their workplaces say, nope, we don't really have a parental leave policy.

00;20;09;28 - 00;20;45;06
Jaclyn Wong
So why don't you take five days off and then come back next week, right. Like that? I had stories like that. Yeah. And then in terms of cultural support, I really had to rely on people's words and what they believed was right to do as men or what was right to do as women. And then in terms of looking at coordinated action, this is where my interviews with partners separately really paid off, because sometimes one person would tell me one story and another person would tell me a very slightly different story.

00;20;45;08 - 00;21;03;27
Jaclyn Wong
And that kind of mismatch would kind of alert me to, I don't know if they're on the same page, and I don't know if this person is really activating some of their resources for, for their partner. And now I've forgotten what your question was. I needed to explain that.

00;21;03;29 - 00;21;25;10
Paul Sullivan
Like, kind of extrapolate out some some trends here. But that's an interesting point there. Like when you found people weren't on the same page, did they fall into one of these, three buckets, or could they have been in in either the three buckets and they really didn't want to be, autonomous actors or they really didn't want to be, consistently compromising.

00;21;25;12 - 00;21;52;08
Jaclyn Wong
Yes. So, the partners who were not on the same page with each other were much more likely to take the autonomous actor pathway. And the way that looked in practice was that men and women kind of endorsed this gender neutral version of egalitarianism, where they believe that men and women should be free to do what they individually want to do.

00;21;52;10 - 00;22;18;20
Jaclyn Wong
So I'm not going to get in your way with whatever career or family pursuits you might have, right? That sounds kind of perhaps egalitarian. It's it's certainly gender neutral, right? It's it's a standard that's applied to both men and women. But where gender came back in was in men's and women's patterns of interaction, where men would kind of passively state why you should do what you want to do.

00;22;18;23 - 00;22;40;23
Jaclyn Wong
I'm going to do my own thing in the corner and stay out of your way. But women were much more proactive in saying, but if we want to do this together, these are the sorts of compromises that I'm willing to make. Like, I can choose to leave my career, right? Like, you know, it's a constrained choice. But men and women are using this gender neutral logic to kind of paper over that.

00;22;40;23 - 00;23;03;05
Jaclyn Wong
They're not really working together and they're not really on the same page because women were working a lot harder to leverage what resources they could access from their workplaces to facilitate a dual career partnership. So it was women who are much more likely to look at family friendly policies, to try to keep the couple together and keep both people's careers, you know, moving forward.

00;23;03;07 - 00;23;29;27
Jaclyn Wong
And men, I don't think we're being malicious at all, right? I think that they just believe that if I stay out of your way, it'll be fine. Rather than how do I actively look for resources from my workplace to enable you to do what you want to do in your career? So they were a surprising bunch to me because the autonomous actors had the same level of structural support as the consistent compromises.

00;23;30;01 - 00;23;55;10
Jaclyn Wong
So they had equal access to workplace family friendly policies. They had equal access to high incomes that could help them outsource, you know, some domestic work and child care. It's just that the men on the autonomous actors pathway never really thought to use it to benefit their their partners and their families. Like they just didn't connect the dots.

00;23;55;15 - 00;24;11;24
Jaclyn Wong
Again, it was not malicious. I think it was very unintentional that they weren't they weren't making the connection that if I use this resource that's available to me at work, I could benefit a lot of people. I could benefit my partner, I could benefit my family, I could benefit my kids.

00;24;11;26 - 00;24;31;11
Paul Sullivan
It's really an issue because we talk at the company dads a lot. I use this analogy of resentment and I say, you know, resentment doesn't emerged fully formed on your wedding day. I mean, obviously, you you meet somebody you love, that person, you get married, maybe you choose to have children and you build this life together. But resentment is more like and this is, I think, an analogy.

00;24;31;11 - 00;25;05;10
Paul Sullivan
Everybody gets, there's dust bunnies that build up under a couch in your house, and you only realize they're there when you move. You pick up the couch like, Holy cow, this is disgusting. How did this happen? I had to vacuum this up. And that's resentment. Resentment builds, you know, gradually. So when you talk about these three different sort of buckets or archetypes, you know, do you see that, once people are in those modes that it's harder for them to change, or the autonomous actors who are, not married yet?

00;25;05;10 - 00;25;17;20
Paul Sullivan
It just a part of me, maybe they break up with that person, they go separate ways, and in the future, maybe they become a consistent compromise. Or maybe they go more the traditional route. Do you have any indication as to, you know, what might happen going for it?

00;25;17;22 - 00;25;44;28
Jaclyn Wong
Yes. So I do think that there is a bit of path dependance. So I capture these people right at this turning point in their lives. Right? They're graduating from school, they're trying to launch their careers, and I follow them for the first five, six years, of them trying to establish themselves professionally and as a family. And I think that the patterns that they develop early on, are easy to stick with, right?

00;25;44;28 - 00;26;18;21
Jaclyn Wong
They become habits, and the kind of ecosystem that you find yourself in, right. What's my workplace context like? What are the cultural messages that are around me? Just kind of get reinforced over time as you stay in that spot that you're in. So I did see a little bit of change over time with the autonomous actors. There kind of working next to each other independently, but over time they become more interdependent with each other.

00;26;18;24 - 00;26;43;16
Jaclyn Wong
Some, some of the autonomous actor couples did break up, as, as you mentioned. And I think that there was some learning, right where when they partnered with new people, they were much more explicit about how do we share a life together? Because what broke us up, what broke my, my previous partner up before was that we were just too autonomous from each other.

00;26;43;18 - 00;27;06;19
Jaclyn Wong
So men in particular really changed their tune. And I was very surprised to be interviewing them. You know, five years later, and they sounded like different people where they said, well, I can't make decisions just for myself. I have to consider what will work for my wife. I need to pay attention to, what I think is going to work for our kids.

00;27;06;19 - 00;27;10;07
Jaclyn Wong
And so there's these transitions into marriage and these transitions.

00;27;10;07 - 00;27;12;11
Paul Sullivan
There's hope for love. I love a hopeful story.

00;27;12;17 - 00;27;50;10
Jaclyn Wong
Yeah. Yeah. So that was also surprising because, previous research indicates that the transition to parenthood, promotes gender traditionalism, where we see men kind of leaning harder into work to kind of fulfill a breadwinner role, and women kind of drawing back from work so that they can meet their childcare responsibilities. But in my study, I noticed that parenthood sometimes allowed people kind of a second chance at really demonstrating and showing that I can be an equal partner and we can be equal partners and we can do this together.

00;27;50;12 - 00;28;19;09
Jaclyn Wong
And so people really appreciated that, particularly the women on the tending traditional pathway. So the men and women who got themselves on the tending traditional pathway were not happy that that's where they were, because they started this study intending to be an equal dual career partnership. And they faced a series of work related challenges that made it very difficult for both people to have careers.

00;28;19;11 - 00;28;47;10
Jaclyn Wong
And so they kind of said, well, for now, let's focus on getting him his career established and we'll get her started on her career later. And they found, of course, that it was it was hard. It was very hard to do. But but the transition to parenthood for these tending traditional couples provided men an opportunity to really be equal parents.

00;28;47;14 - 00;29;13;13
Jaclyn Wong
And so, yes, he has, you know, a demanding job, and he is kind of the financial rock of the family. But he is making such a concerted effort to come home in time for dinner every day. He is making a concerted effort to say, on weekends I am 100% in charge of childcare because I know how hard it is for you to be with the kids five days a week while I'm gone.

00;29;13;15 - 00;29;28;17
Jaclyn Wong
And so it was pretty interesting and surprising to see those kinds of patterns, because previous research would say then couples specialize. And she is 100% in charge of the kids, and he is 100% invested in work. But not not the couples in my study.

00;29;28;19 - 00;29;46;15
Paul Sullivan
Right, right. This is great. And, just a couple more questions. I'm really enjoying talking to you. And, before I'll preface this by saying, when my first book came out, my first book was called clutch. And, the same week a book came out called choke. And it turned out to be great because they both got reviewed together in the Wall Street Journal.

00;29;46;15 - 00;30;07;16
Paul Sullivan
But you have, just read this book, Equal Partners with a question mark. And a couple, months ago, another academic named Kate Mangino, released a book called Equal Partners without a question mark. And I asked you this question, you know, the subtitle of her book, and she was on the podcast while ago is Improving Gender Equality at Home.

00;30;07;22 - 00;30;38;08
Paul Sullivan
You know, that that's the goal that's in the subtitle of your book is, you know how dual professional couples make career relationship and family decisions? How do you see, like when you see your book out there in the world, you know, how do you see it? Affecting change your how do you see, you know, what do you hope, people take away from it, when they read it or if other academics read it, incorporate, some of your research into their classes.

00;30;38;10 - 00;30;41;24
Paul Sullivan
What impact do you hope that that your book has?

00;30;41;26 - 00;31;13;16
Jaclyn Wong
Yeah, I, I really hope that the readers of my book will recognize that. The issue of gender equality is not solely an individual problem to fix. As I mentioned to you, with the work family ecosystem Systems framework, it is the confluence of structural support, cultural support and collaborative action across partners that can really get us to having equal partnerships.

00;31;13;18 - 00;31;59;07
Jaclyn Wong
And I think that sometimes we we see a lot of books that are very healthy, that say, what can you do to, you know, balance work and family. What can you do? You know, to facilitate gender equality in, in your relationship. But what my book is saying is that you can only do so much if you do not live in a society that has culturally supportive attitudes for egalitarianism and does not offer structure, all material support in terms of our workplaces and the the availability of childcare and other kinds of policies that make it possible for people to really weave together, work and family in a way that can be shared equally across

00;31;59;07 - 00;32;31;22
Jaclyn Wong
all the people who are responsible for providing financial and, you know, direct care to our families. So I hope that people can see that. Yeah, you do need to be coordinated and acting with your partner and, you know, collaborating together. But how can we then move beyond our couple and our relationship in our household to to think of what's the kind of collective action that I need to be taking with my coworkers at work to lobby for the kinds of support that we need?

00;32;31;29 - 00;33;03;27
Jaclyn Wong
How do I start talking to people in my community and planting these, these ideas, that it is culturally acceptable for men and women to be equally involved at home and at work? And that it's actually quite beneficial for everyone because families that have dual earner, dual caregiver models seem to be more resilient against these broader economic instabilities that we are continuing to see, in our society.

00;33;03;27 - 00;33;18;21
Jaclyn Wong
Right. And families that are dual caregivers are more resilient against things like, a sudden health shock among someone who might have been, you know, responsible for running the household.

00;33;18;24 - 00;33;44;01
Paul Sullivan
This is wonderful. Jacqueline Wang, assistant professor at the University of Carolina and author of Equal Partners How Dual Professional Couples Make Career, Relationship, and Family Decisions. Thank you so much, for being on the Company of Dads podcast. One last question before I let you go, off air, you said, you have a partner? No kids yet.

00;33;44;04 - 00;33;53;22
Paul Sullivan
What are you what are you guys, are you consistent? Compromiser, autonomous actor, tending tradition? I have to ask the professor. How have you arranged your own?

00;33;53;24 - 00;34;15;12
Jaclyn Wong
Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so my partner knows everything about my research because he can't get away from me talking about it, right. And he. He tells me all the time that if he did not know about my research, he would have been an autonomous actor thinking that if I just do my own thing in the corner and stay out of your way, everything is going to be great.

00;34;15;12 - 00;34;38;14
Jaclyn Wong
But as he, you know, heard me talk about my research, he realized, no, I need to actually be quite active in working with you to make sure that both of us are able to do the things that we want to do in our careers. So I think that I think that we are quite consistent, and compromising in our, in our work and family lives.

00;34;38;17 - 00;35;03;03
Jaclyn Wong
I still do think we kind of tend, a little bit autonomous. But it is, it is interesting that, it has given us space to reflect on how we are and how we act with each other and what sorts of work, place, resources and barriers we face that are that are different. Like, I'm a professor, I go to campus, I work, you know, in person, and he works from home.

00;35;03;03 - 00;35;25;06
Jaclyn Wong
100%. So this this is like, a scenario that that we think about a lot where he has quite a lot of workplace flexibility. And I'm flexible as a professor to some extent. Right. Over the summers maybe, but during the semester I teach until this time I can be home to cook dinner. So you're on dinner.

00;35;25;06 - 00;35;31;08
Paul Sullivan
Did you get this guy signed up? He sounds like a perfectly dad for the company. Dad.

00;35;31;10 - 00;35;32;17
Jaclyn Wong
I'll let him know.

00;35;32;20 - 00;35;35;26
Paul Sullivan
All right, professor, thank you again. I really enjoyed this.

00;35;35;29 - 00;35;37;18
Jaclyn Wong
Thank you.

00;35;37;21 - 00;36;06;13
Paul Sullivan
Thank you for listening to the company of that podcast. I also want to thank the people who make this podcast and everything else that we do. The company of dads possible. Helder Mira, who is our audio producer Lindsay Decker, handles all of our social media. Terry Brennan, who's helping us with the newsletter and audience acquisition, Emily Servin, who is our web maestro, and of course, Evan Roosevelt, who is working side by side with me on many of the things that we do here at The Company of Dads.

00;36;06;13 - 00;36;15;16
Paul Sullivan
It's a great team. And we're we're just trying to bring you the best in fatherhood. Remember, the one stop shop for everything is our newsletter, the dad.

00;36;15;16 - 00;36;20;19

Sign up at the company of dads.com backslash. The dad. Thank you again for listening.