Episode 189: Stop Telling Women to Find an Equal Partner
/Show transcript:
Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte.
This time…what does it really mean to have a 50/50 partner?
“I had moved and made multiple accommodations for my husband's job. And this was finally the big moment where I needed his accommodations. And for as much as we had talked about taking turns and supporting each other…that was the moment that my marriage fell apart.”
Equality in relationships, and finding the support all women need to get ahead.
Coming up on The Broad Experience.
Back in January I came across an article in Harvard Business Review with a bit of a clickbait title: Stop Telling Working Women They Just Need an Equal Partnership at Home.
It was written by an academic.
“I'm Bobbi Thomason. I'm an assistant professor of applied behavioral science at Pepperdine's Graziadio Business School.”
Pepperdine University is just outside Los Angeles. Bobbi lives in campus housing with her little girl, who’s four. And on this day, she was determined to dress a favorite doll in red…
Daughter: “This is…We need to find a dress, a red dress that is gonna fit her, OK?”
Bobbi: “OK. I think maybe, uh…the doll clothes are in the medium basket upstairs.”
Daughter: “No…Mama, remember my baby clothes, maybe we can use one of those? Where are they…” [voices fade down]
“For the most part I can manage my daughter and my job quite nicely as an academic, I wake up early and right before she wakes up, she's in nursery school in the morning. So I can do conversations like this. I can have meetings, I can get in some more writing. And then when I pick her up after lunch, we have the afternoon together, we do play dates. We go to the playground, we go to the library, we do classes.”
But getting to this point of relative ease and contentment has not been easy. Bobbi studies women and careers for a living. But that article she wrote for HBR about equal partners wasn’t just written with her academic hat on. It came from personal experience.
Throughout the pandemic there’s been a lot of coverage about the terrible time many mothers have been going through doing so much at home, on top of their work. Bobbi doesn't dispute that for a minute. But she says every time an article like this appeared, her social media feeds would light up…
“And then this chorus in the comment section of women saying, oh, I have a 50/50 partner. I couldn't do it if it wasn't for my 50/50 partner, which ends up being followed up with, Why don't women just ask their partners to do their share around the household? Why don't women just insist their husbands pick up the slack at home?”
Bobbi says five years ago, she probably would have agreed with them. But as the pandemic rolled on and these pieces proliferated, she was going through the hardest time in her life.
“I was in the midst of a divorce at the time, a very contentious, long, difficult one. And I study gender. I wrote my dissertation about female executives and their work family interface. I teach negotiation. I consult for Lean In. I was not a naive woman. I was thinking a lot about what it meant to get, not just a 50/50 partner in terms of someone that did the dishes and helped with childcare, but a true partnership in which we supported each other and took turns and were each other's biggest advocates. And as much as I went into my marriage looking for that, aware of gender dynamics and how that could be hard to achieve, I still found myself awake at three o'clock in the morning because I was really stressed out in the midst of a divorce. And I just felt like this focus on women saying, one, it's about splitting household chores and two, it's as simple as just telling your husband to buck up and do his part, was really overlooking a lot of complexity.”
AM-T: “Yeah, I want you to take me back in time. Tell me a little bit about your career trajectory and your ambitions and how a partner played into that. I think a lot of women still grow up hoping to have a career and a good partnership and a family, so what happened in your case?”
“I think I had always hoped to have both. I've been an academic for most of my professional life and I met my husband in the first year of my PhD at Stanford. So I was very committed to an academic career. I'm at a business school. And for me, the joy of academia was to be able to focus on ideas that I was passionate about. Find questions that I thought were not just intellectually stimulating, but really personally relevant.”
Bobbi had read Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In; she just mentioned that she consults for the organization. And if you read it you’ll remember that Sheryl Sandberg spoke glowingly about her supportive husband Dave Goldberg, who died just two years after the book came out. She advised other heterosexual women to look for a man who wanted an equal partnership…
“And so there was this idea, this narrative of finding a Dave, right, that smart, ambitious women that were feminist enough, and self-respecting enough would find a Dave. And all of a sudden I was - I thought I found a Dave, I wanted to find a Dave, and I did not have a Dave.”
AM-T: “So when you met your now former husband did the two of you do what author Jennifer Petriglieri advises, we both know who she is, she wrote this book called Couples That Work specifically about this topic of couples and career progression and transitions that couples go through in their lives. Did you have that conversation, how did it work?”
“We talked a lot about it, a lot. I was very aware of these dynamics. I was in the midst of my PhD taking my gender seminars, reading The Second Shift about how women do the majority of household chores, reading these articles coming out, that when women negotiate for their careers to take priority, they get backlash in terms of less emotional support, reading about how, when women earn more than their husbands, their marriages become less stable. So it was very, very front of mind. One of the reasons I fell in love with my now ex-husband is that he's brilliant and ambitious. And so I had a huge amount of admiration for him and his work. So we did talk about it a lot. And I think, unfortunately, talking about navigating these transitions and two careers ended up being really different than doing so, particularly once there was a baby in the picture.”
She can’t talk in detail about the circumstances of her divorce. But Bobbi says when their daughter was born she was on the cusp of getting her first tenure-track position at a university. She was in her early thirties.
“We were in a transition at the time, he was in between jobs and I had multiple job offers. And to my understanding, we agreed upon moving to Los Angeles in part, because that was a place that he could work. And ultimately he decided to take a job in a different place.”
She says she’d moved for him, and been a big cheerleader of him and his work. Now he wouldn’t move for her job.
“I mean, for me, it was a moment of getting the rug pulled out from me, thinking that I had committed to a job where we could be a family and realizing that he wasn't going to move after all. Um, and there certainly were conversations in which he said, can't you just come to the east coast, or do something else for work. And that was really quite crushing after multiple accommodations of his career.”
AM-T: “Switching to the trauma of a divorce, I don’t think I've actually ever in my time of doing this show spoken at length with any guest about the effect this type of divorce has had on your emotional life, but also your work life.”
“It was devastating on so many levels. Emotionally it was just, I was heartbroken. And then after I was heartbroken, once we were in the midst of litigation, I was under attack. My character is under attack in litigation. My ability to keep my job and my child, our child, was under attack. So just the emotional toll of it was intense. I mean, I look back at pictures of myself before the divorce and I see less gray hair and fewer wrinkles. I look different. I, you know, just the hours and the bandwidth for my job - I am evaluated, not just on the quality of my work, but the quantity of work that I do in a given period of time. And for three and a half years, one, there were just hours that I could not be working because I was in court or in advance of going to court. I was meeting with my lawyers and the bandwidth was just completely sucked up. And I mean, there were some things I was able to ask for accommodations around my job, but there were other things like when I was teaching my first day of classes, that the court system doesn't work around. And so I missed a lot of classes. I had to ask colleagues to cover for me when I was in court.”
Court was also 3,000 miles away on the east coast. Making her court dates involved a complicated flight schedule and very little sleep. She was emotionally and physically drained.
“I had started this new job. And I think every single one of my coworkers saw me cry. Like not get teared up, but like I truly broke down crying at some moment in front of all of them. So in so many ways, it was disruptive for being the sort of professional that I aspire to be.”
And that was just the emotional side.
“Financially it was devastating as well. So my divorce happened, I had finished my PhD, which luckily I did not have to go into debt. My PhD was funded and I lived on the stipend, but I was making what, $37,000 as a doctoral student…this is all to say, I'd really not hit my prime earning years yet. And as I was starting, finally having my faculty salary, I started incurring legal bills. And the cost of my divorce is years of my salary. So I went into debt very quickly and I liquidated retirement accounts. I borrowed money. And I still owe a lot of money to a lot of people.”
But compared to how she felt a year ago, today she feels great. Life is still complicated. She has her daughter most of the time but the custody schedule involves cross-country travel for both parties.
Bobbi’s parents moved cross-country to be near her, to help her care for her daughter. We’re going to talk more about women’s support networks in a bit.
I asked her why she felt it was important to write that piece for Harvard Business Review. And she said so many articles about women’s pandemic overwhelm emphasize the sharing of tasks. But she says the lack of equality in her relationship felt more fundamental.
“What I think is incredibly difficult is to upend these gendered identities, these power dynamics of who do you move for, who's the primary career that one person would sacrifice for. And that's where I think our gender dynamics really play out and become incredibly difficult in organizations that expect devotion in terms of hours and mobility…actually, I think a lot of the things that dual career couples need are the flexibility to move, being truly excited for someone else, being truly supportive when they have a hard day, believing that their entrepreneurial idea is important enough that you invest family funds. There's just so much that couples need to do for one another beyond tasks to be supportive.”
Another thing that concerns her? She says the find an equal partner story…
“While a very important starting place, has turned into this very individualist narrative of ‘women need to pick a 50/50 partner.’ And it makes a problem and a pattern that is gendered at a societal level fall only on the shoulders of individual women.
And I mentioned those social media comments about why don't women just pick a 50/50 partner, why don't women just tell their spouses to do their share? It's just not that simple. For me, once it was clear that I didn't have an equal partner that would make the sacrifices for me that I would make for him, getting out of that took years of energy and hundreds of thousands of dollars, and took a toll on a relationship that we need to maintain the rest of our lives, because we have this amazing little girl together. So it was really costly and painful to simply decide I deserved an equal partner.”
She says she is hardly the only woman whose expectations turned out to be at odds with reality.
Putting her academic hat on, she points to research on Harvard Business School graduates done several years ago that showed that even among the then youngest generation in the workplace - her own generation, millennials - men and women had different expectations. Half the men expected their careers to come first - before that of a female partner. Three quarters of the women expected their careers would be at least as important as that of their partner.
Going through her divorce was hell. But Bobbi Thomason says she’s learned that support comes in many forms. Society puts so much emphasis on finding love, and a supportive spouse, but she learned from her own research, and then her own life, that that’s not the whole story.
She wrote her doctoral dissertation on women’s ascent to executive roles in the Middle East and Africa. She interviewed about 70 powerful women in those parts of the world about how they’d gotten to where they were. Then she wrote up her findings.
“I shared the paper; I kept getting feedback: You know, your most interesting quotes here are about husbands. And I really struggled with that feedback because I was not going to write a paper about how women's careers are contingent on their husbands. That just did not rub me the right way, but suddenly I was going through a divorce and my husband was having a big impact and had been having a big impact on my career.
And I suddenly became motivated. What happens when women don't have a Dave? How do they move forward? And I felt like I needed to figure that answer out personally, in my own life. And it ended up being the question I focused on in my research and the finding ended up being absolutely husbands matter lot, but what really shapes whether a husband's expectation that his wife's career comes second to his, and that she'd be the primary caregiver, whether that ends up being the expectation that wives acquiesce to, depends on the networks around her, depends on the people that step in to either offer emotional support, like families, who help care for kids, friends that say ‘you're doing a great job. Your career is really important. It's okay to let other people love your children.’ It was this both emotional and logistical support that these networks offer.”
She found part of the success of the women came down to these things: they might not have a particularly supportive husband, but if they had supportive friends, family who believed that as women they still deserved a good career, relatives who helped them care for their children…that made a big difference to their trajectories.
And these things are making a difference to Bobbi too.
“It really was a broad network that I think got me through a really hard time and ensured that I was able to keep moving professionally. And so it was my parents who helped me take care of my daughter. It was colleagues that were willing to step up and help me with classes and were understanding when I was emotional at a meeting that I wasn't intending to be emotional at.”
It was co-authors of her research - fellow academics who understood she couldn’t work at the same pace as usual. It was the online writing group that became a refuge from the world of litigation. And it was mom friends around the campus who reminded her she and her daughter were part of a community.
That’s The Broad Experience for this time. Thanks to Bobbi Thomason for being my guest on this show.
I will link you to Bobbi’s Harvard Business Review piece and another related piece about women, careers and relationships under this episode at TheBroadExperience.com. That one is called If You Can’t Find a Spouse Who Supports Your Career, Stay Single.
You can also post a comment on this episode on the website - I’d love to get your feedback. You can also reach me via email, or social media.
I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. Thanks for listening.