Negotiation in the age of the dual-career couple

Stefan Stern in The FT

To mark the recent centenary of the Harvard Business Review, editor-in-chief Adi Ignatius dipped into the archive and found, among other things, an article from 1956 titled “Successful Wives of Successful Executives”.

“It is the task of the wife to co-operate in working towards the goals set by her husband,” the article stated. “This means accepting — or perhaps encouraging — the business trips, the long hours at the office, and the household moves dictated by his business career.”

It got worse. The husband, the piece continued, “may meet someone who conforms more closely to the new social standards he has acquired while moving socially upward; he may discard his wife either by taking a new wife or by concentrating all his attention on his business.” Yuk.

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

The words appear in “Money and Love: an Intelligent Road Map for Life’s Biggest Decisions”, written by Myra Strober, 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 the issues surrounding professional and domestic life. The authors reject an artificial notion of “balance”. Instead there are necessary, hard-headed but human trade-offs. “If you want lives that are not just two individuals pursuing career aspirations separately, then it takes a lot of negotiation and a lot of discussion, and compromise,” Davisson explained when I met the authors in London.

Strober led a course called “work and family” at Stanford’s graduate school of business (SGSB) for several decades until her retirement in 2018. She was one of the first female faculty members there on her appointment in the early 1970s.

“If I had proposed my course at the business school would be called ‘money and love’ instead of ‘work and family’ I would have had some pushback,” she told me. But wasn’t this in California in the days following the “summer of love”? “The business school was not buying that then either!” she noted.

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

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

Davisson said: “The mental models that 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 imagine one.

“I have two boys,” she said, “and they see my husband as the head chef. They think it’s funny when I cook . . . They will have this model of us sharing the workload. All the home responsibilities do not fall on one person.”

During the Covid pandemic, employees, parents and carers had their roles blended as they worked from home and tried to keep family life going. For some that has been an opportunity to more equally share the domestic workload, for others it has made the mythical work/life balance harder to achieve.

The authors say more is needed. “We need to invest in excellent childcare,” Strober said. “This is something business leaders need to be thinking about.” Davisson added: “We see birth rates falling, people not wanting to fund the cost, and then we wonder why people are not having more children.”

Although Strober’s course was greatly valued by students — with men, incidentally, making up 40 per cent of participants — SGSB chose not to continue it after her retirement.

That risks the business school reverting to a too narrow focus on money and how to make it — without thinking about the human factor.

Strober is all too familiar with that split. She cites the 18th-century philosopher Adam Smith’s two books: The Wealth of Nations, which covers free markets and the workings of the economy; and The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which focuses on social cohesion and relationships.

“Most people only know about The Wealth of Nations,” said Strober. “It’s too bad that he separated out those two books. Had he blended the discussion of wealth with the discussion of altruism we might not be quite so separated on them.”

We need both money and love. “Having money isn’t worth it unless you also have love,” Davisson said. And Strober’s final piece of advice? “The trick is to find someone to be your life partner who has the same philosophy as you do.”

Why Marry?

by Girish Menon

In response to my piece Modern Marriages - For Better or For Worse, an erudite reader asked ‘Why Marry?’ This person also asked whether one could lead a better productive life without marrying? In this piece, this writer will give some views on the matter.

In India, despite all the modernity, sex before marriage and outside marriage is still frowned upon. Until consensual sex becomes as common place as meeting a friend for coffee, there will always be some supporters of marriage.

This also begs the question whether both individuals in a marriage are content with the quantity and quality of sex available?

Another question that arises is whether the absence of sex reduces the productive potential of an individual. I will plead ignorance on this matter too.

The economic rationale for marriage used to be property inheritance. Much has been written about it which I will not revisit. However, in these days of ‘reliable’ paternity tests, the need for marriage to ensure that property goes to the sperm donor’s offspring is obsolete.

Of course, I am of the view that no child should inherit their parents’ property. But there needs a lot of change in societal arrangements for this to happen; something which I don’t think will happen in my lifetime.

What of the children born of a sexual union, whether consensual or accidental? If it is consensual, then the couple should have a plan for raising their child. As for ‘accidental’ children - there shouldn’t be too many due to the availability of many pregnancy termination choices available for women in the market place.

What impact will this have on the population of a society? If trends are to be believed, all over the world where women have shown an upward trajectory in economic independence the rate of population growth has declined significantly. This augurs well even from a climate change perspective as the demand for resources could dwindle with a rapidly declining population.

Could there ever be a time when one would have to exhort women to produce more children? I don’t think that will be ever be necessary in the future, because by the time we reach this Utopia medical technology may enable production of full grown adults. This will also take away the burden of child care from either cohabiting partner leaving them free to pursue their potential.

Our workplaces are about as family-friendly as a 19th-century mill

Maternity leave, sick pay, the minimum wage – the ability to claim these vital rights has been torched by our zero-hours economy

 

• 
• • Zoe Williams
  • The Guardian, Wednesday 29 January 2014

'The idea that you can plan high-quality childcare or a work-life balance in zero-hours conditions is laughable.' Illustration by Belle Mellor

Crack open a conversation about the family in political circles, and it's like Christmas Day in the trenches. Agreement breaks out: there's nothing more important than security, happiness and high-quality childcare in the early years; every child matters; women deserve their place in the workforce, men deserve their time in the homestead; both genders are desperately welcome – invaluable, irreplaceable! – in all settings; and (altogether now) we all want to be more like Scandinavia.

Delving a little deeper, there are some disagreements between the parties, or – for brevity – between Liz Truss, the childcare minister, and everybody else. Labour and the Lib Dems think the answer to universal, high-quality childcare is to find some equitable way for the government to fund it. Truss still thinks that the market would work on its own, if only big government would step out of the way. Her plan is for childcare workers to be better trained, and therefore allowed to manage more children. It is a stupid plan. No amount of GCSEs will increase your number of arms, hands and eyes. Yet she is to be admired for breaking ranks and allowing her neoliberalism free expression. Nobody else will mention market forces devant les enfants; it's almost as if the market were some kind of swearword.

And yet, despite every advance, every warm progressive statement, every assurance of "family-friendliness", conditions for parents at work worsen; discrimination against pregnant women intensifies . The rather nugatory fortnight of paternity leave goes largely unclaimed among low-income workers, while 80% of those on middle to high incomes take it. Most low-waged mothers go back to work after fewer than the 26 weeks of "ordinary maternity leave", most mothers on medium to high incomes take more than six months.

There is a gulf between the promises made to families by politicians, and the life that is delivered. There is also a gulf between rich and poor, which is then biologised by the likes of Iain Duncan Smith and his Centre for Social Justice, who blame "bad parenting" on poor people who don't love their babies enough to want to spend their first year with them. But we're just going to have to do that another day.

I believe the work situation is substantially down to the way we talk about life in gender silos, where "children", "maternity leave", "pregnancy" and "families" are filed under "women", while "industrial relations", "tribunals", "contracts" and "workplace" go under "men". This has blinded us to the fact that many statutory entitlements can never be upheld. Maybe you have the wrong kind of job or the wrong kind of (zero hours) contract; some rights build up over time and you can't prove unbroken service if you've never had a proper contract. Even if you could, your position is too precarious to insist on the rights you do have; and if it all turns sour you can't take anybody to a tribunal because since last July you've had to pay to do so.

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development recently released research on the reality of zero-hours work: 75% of workers didn't know how much money they'd have at the end of the week, and 42% were given less than 12 hours' notice about shifts. The idea that you can plan "high-quality childcare" in these conditions, or a favourable work-life balance, is laughable.

By way of illustration, I saw this advert in Costa Coffee (Eastleigh, Hampshire) the other day: "Staff wanted … 20 hours a week. MUST BE FREE 6AM TO 9PM, SEVEN DAYS A WEEK". Never mind, says the Office for National Statistics – only 0.7% of people are on zero hours; but this amounts to 250,000 workers. Norman Lamb, the care minister, has admitted to 300,000 zero-hours workers in social care. A Working Families report this week finds 7% of women and over 2% of men on zero hours.

The CIPD put the number of zero-hours workers at about a million. But try to stay cheerful – they still have rights: sick pay; minimum wage; holiday pay; maternity leave. Sure, it doesn't stretch to the right to request flexible working, which could explain why requests from fathers on low incomes are so often refused. Nevertheless, it's not like working in a mill in the 19th century.

Except that, often, it is. This employment feels too precarious for people to insist on the rights they do have, and anyway those rights are sidestepped by a week-long break in the job (easily within the employer's command). And let's say your employer reneges on your maternity package: well, it will cost you £1,200 to bring that to a tribunal. The drop in sex discrimination claims has been stark: there were 129 in September – the average for the six months before the charge was brought in was 2,055 . "We have to be careful we're not just talking about paper rights," said Sally Brett from the TUC

Back in 2011, Steve Hilton floated the idea across his blue sky that maybe maternity leave should be abolished, just while we were in recession, so business could get back on its feet, without having to worry about a load of uteruses? And we all (well, I) went nuts, saying: "This recasts women as burdens to work instead of assets, and remakes babies as costs for the tidy, solitary little household to bear, rather than a future for us all to invest in." Well, they goddam did it anyway, and you have to admire their cunning: they didn't torch the right; they torched the ability to claim the right. It became a paper right, and now we watch as it goes up in smoke.

Motherhood, the career that dare not speak its name

By Cristina Odone Politics Last updated: March 13th, 2013 

Claire Perry MP: motherhood is a career

Claire Perry, Tory MP for Devizes and childhood guru to David Cameron, says she's had three careers: she's been a banker, a mother and a politician. It is brave of her – and not because bankers and politicians are the most despised professions around. Ms Perry is brave because she makes claims for motherhood that has too many feminists and members of the Coalition sneering: it is a full-time, unpaid job.

Perry is promoting "Mothers at Home Matter", a group that wants the Coalition to recognise the contribution of stay-at-home mothers. Their message is urgent: when the state has to step in to care for children, the tax payers end up paying millions in creches and programmes like SureStart – now recognised as a hugely expensive Labour failure.

Worse, psychologists are now worrying that being raised outside their home environment by a succession of "professionals" can scar children for life. In Sweden, where this is a matter of routine, school records show the highest truancy and "worst classroom disorder" in western Europe. The star witness for MAHM was Jonas Himmlestrand, expert in Swedish family policy, who reported that his homeland, where 90 per cent of children are in subsidised child care, has seen a serious decline in adolescent mental health, between 1986 -2002 declined faster than in 10 comparable European countries.

So, forget the Swedish model. MAHM believes the key to happy families is to change the tax system that right now forces women to work. The UK is almost alone amongst developed countries in not recognising family and spousal responsibilities in its tax system. The burden on the single earner has more than doubled in the last 50 years. Many single earner families are in the poorest third of the population. MAHM want families taxed on the basis of household rather than individual income. They call "for a debate about income-splitting, transferable tax allowances and protecting child benefit for parents with dependent children."

Politicians should pay attention: the number of mothers who stay at home is down to a third — but, as I found out when I researched "What Women Really Want" for the Centre for Policy Studies, the majority of mothers would like to stay at home to look after their children. That's quite a constituency, Messrs Cameron et al. Ignore it (and your pledge to introduce family tax credits) at your peril.