Competing Desires: How Young Adult Couples Negotiate Moving for Career Opportunities

• In Event: 381 - Section on the Sociology of the Family Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 10. Work and Family: Session II

Abstract

Family migration research has repeatedly documented the outcomes of heterosexual dual-career couples’ career and relocation decisions. Yet, we know less about the decision process that results in such outcomes, and how such processes may contribute to gendered career trajectories. To address this gap, I conducted a three-stage, longitudinal interview study on exiting graduate and professional school students and their heterosexual partners who are facing the decision to move for a career opportunity. Augmenting England and Kilbourne’s (1990) theory of spousal bargaining with Blair-Loy’s (2001; 2003) devotion schemas, I construct a “competing desires” framework that analyzes the work and family devotion schemas that shape couple’s decision-making processes. I show that when work and family come into conflict, young couples’ bargaining process follows one of three patterns. In the first group, couples adhered to existing schemas for work and family devotion. Women in this group gave up their desires for careers to allow the couple to balance work and family as a unit. Another group altered existing cultural schemas for work and family and consistently compromised over work and family roles. The last group of couples exhibited an unexpected bargaining process in which men withdrew from decision-making, effectively leaving the work of coordinating two careers and the couple’s life together to women. Each bargaining process represents a possible pathway by which some women become disadvantaged early in their careers, and sheds light on how gender difference in work and family roles persists despite social change around gender, work, and family.

Author

• Jaclyn S. Wong, University of Chicago