Can Dual-Career Couples Achieve Equality at Home?

In this seminar, UC Santa Barbara professor Sarah Thébaud will discuss how couples often end up with gendered divisions of labor, even when they prefer equality and when they experience myriad advantages like access to supportive work-family policies and ample financial resources. Why? Thébaud will speak to this puzzle by presenting findings from analyses of original survey data drawn from four large, US-based, elite professional services and consumer goods firms. She focuses on highly paid and ideologically progressive dual-career professionals and specifies novel factors operating at organizational, family, and individual levels of analysis that function as ultimate roadblocks to equality. Her findings also support a new theoretical framework—gendered organizational ecosystems—which highlight how equality depends not only on the policies and practices of a worker’s organization, but also on those of their spouse’s organization. 

Sarah Thébaud is a professor of Sociology, Director of the Work and Family Innovation Lab at the Broom Center for Demography, and Faculty Affiliate of Technology Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research identifies social psychological and institutional processes that contribute to gender inequalities in work, families, higher education, and entrepreneurship. Her work has appeared in academic outlets such as American Sociological Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, Gender & Society, Social Forces, and the Annual Review of Sociology, as well as leading media publications like the New York Times, NPR, the Atlantic, and the Wall Street Journal. Before arriving at UCSB, she earned a PhD in Sociology from Cornell University and was a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University.

This virtual seminar is part of WAPPP’s weekly fall series Exploring Work and Family, led by WAPPP's co-director Hannah Riley Bowles. Attendance is open to all.