New Problem in Dual-Career Marriages
Women who combine careers and motherhood have had a few years to come to terms with the so-called “superwoman syndrome.”
Now, a new study reported by Stanford University suggests that dual-career couples with children have encountered “super man “ and the results are high anxiety levels among men.
Thomas W. Harrell, professor emeritus of applied psychology at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and Jane Baack of the San Francisco State University School of Business looked at couples who had obtained MBA degrees from Stanford, Santa Clara, Harvard, Berkeley or San Francisco State between 1973 and 1978 and who had children and worked outside the home.
They found that among these dual-career parents more husbands than wives reported anxiety about their lives. On a self-evaluation questionnaire, about two-thirds of the wives scored high anxiety levels and about four-fifths of the husbands. The authors were not sure why. Other studies have suggested that having a successful professional wife undermines a man’s self-image. However, Harrell and Baack also cited a study that found the highest cost of a dual-career family was “stress due to physical and emotional overload, particularly by men who were parents.”
They speculate that men are experiencing the same kind of load coping with career, marriage, home and children as their wives--but with less preparation. “There are few role models for men in dual-career marriages,” they wrote. “Men don’t have new magazines telling them how to cope with work and family. There are almost no studies of ‘supermen’ and how they cope. . . . In the long run, men may have much to gain from dual-career marriages, but in the short run they lose power and custom.”
A Lack of Role Models
Harrell and Baack also suggest that the men with MBA wives have more career anxieties than men whose wives care for their homes and children. “Husbands have always just assumed that careers can be combined with families, but having an employed wife affects the husband’s ability to be successful.”
The authors compared their group of career couples to a similar group of couples in which the husband had an MBA and supported the family while the wife stayed at home. Both the husbands and wives in this group scored much lower anxiety levels than the dual-career couples. In addition, the men whose wives did not work had significantly higher incomes. The median income of MBA wives was $45,000 to $55,000 a year. Their husbands’ median earnings were in the $55,000 to $65,000 range, but two-thirds of the husbands whose wives cared for the home and children full time reported incomes of $75,000 or more. This suggests that a wife at home enhances a husband’s earning power, but it is possible that these men were earning higher salaries anyway and that this enabled their wives to stay at home.
The public is invited to nominate the heroes and villains of sex equity in education for 1986. The Project on Equal Education Rights (PEER) of the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund is making a national search for the schools or individuals in education who will receive its Silver Snail and Golden Gazelle awards.
The Silver Snail is for those who have been “brazenly counterproductive or glacially slow” in implementing Title IX of the Civil Rights Act and the Women’s Educational Equity Act which deal with sex discrimination in education. Previous recipients include U.S. Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese (who received the Supreme Snail for 1985), the state of Utah for having the fewest female school superintendents of any state in 1985 and the Redlands, Calif., school district for operating a sex-segregated high school honors program. (The district has since changed its method of selecting students for the program.)
The Golden Gazelle, new this year, is for those who have made outstanding efforts in promoting equal education rights for women and girls.
Make nominations in writing with as much documentation as possible to Leslie Wolfe, Director, Project on Equal Education Rights, 1413 K St., N.W., 9th Floor, Washington, D.C. 20005. Nominations will be held in confidence. Include the name, address and phone number of the person submitting the nomination.
