How I Met Your Other
Why, by dint of a husband being important, does his wife somehow become a less-than, no matter her qualifications?
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The first time I met the diplomat’s wife, she was delightful: funny, charismatic and—above all—a gracious host at a fancy event to which I’d been invited.
The second time I met her, I discovered her to be a great conversationalist, well-read, well-traveled and well-spoken. I so enjoyed our chat, in fact, that I suggested we meet a third time—this time, just the two of us.
And it was during this third meeting, over lunch, that I learned what I should have found out months prior: That she’s a brilliantly savvy businesswoman, with a stellar career and fierce resolve to change people’s lives and the world for the better, something she’s managing to do with aplomb—by running a non-profit—all while astutely performing her role as mother and wife.
Why did this come as such a surprise to me?
After all, it’s 2024. And while it’s true that we still have an extraordinarily long way to go in terms of creating a gender equal world, a handful of countries have reached gender parity in their governments. Some 14 countries have enshrined the same legal rights for women as men, and the number of women running Fortune 500 companies is technically at an all-time—albeit pitiful—high of 10.4%.
And that’s not all: About one-third of workers in the U.S.’s 10 highest-paying occupations are now women, which is obviously still not enough, but it’s a sharp rise from a measly 13% in 1980. The share of women in opposite-sex marriages who earn as much as—or more—than their husbands has approximately tripled over the past half century. And finally, it’s been a full four decades since women surpassed men in the number of Americans earning a bachelor’s degree each year.
Yet still, if a successful woman marries a successful man, the recognition of her success is often imperiled. It’s like attachment means that two things can’t exist at once, so one person has to—and, yes, it’s almost always the man—outshine the other.
Remember when Hillary Rodham Clinton—who The National Law Journal twice named one of the hundred most influential lawyers in America—suddenly became just “the first lady”? Even having served as a senator and the U.S. secretary of state, she is still regularly referred to as the “former first lady.”
And remember when the writer Joseph Epstein got all hot and bothered about Dr. Jill Biden using her honorific? “Madame First Lady—Mrs. Biden—Jill—kiddo,” his op-ed in The Wall Street Journal began. “Any chance you might drop the ‘Dr.’ before your name?” he went on. “‘Dr. Jill Biden’ sounds and feels fraudulent, not to say a touch comic.”
Of course, it hasn't escaped my notice that Dr. Biden’s husband is none other the President of the United States of America. And of course, in terms of jobs it doesn’t get much more prestigious than that. But also, why do we ever have to diminish a first lady’s—or indeed any woman’s—academic or professional achievements? It’s not like a hard-earned Ph.D. is a threat to foreign policy. Why, by dint of a husband being important, does his wife somehow become a less-than, no matter her qualifications?
The Power of Defaults
Before I go on, let’s be clear about one thing: Men in heterosexual relationships are often wildly supportive of their partners. I’m not suggesting otherwise. In the diplomat’s case, that is certainly true.
What’s also true is that men, just like women, unequivocally deserve to shine and be celebrated when they do extraordinary things. In the oft-quoted words of suffragist and abolitionist Sarah Grimké “I ask no favors for my sex.” But the recognition of his brilliance should not constitute a zero-sum game: His success should not set her back.
We know that cultural defaults related to gender roles are deep-rooted and stubborn, and that even in what we might think of as a power couple, they widely prevail. In other words, what we as a society are accustomed to—and what we’ve been conditioned over centuries to expect—is that a man is professionally and economically successful while a woman makes the home.
Thankfully, although that cultural default is challenged frequently, we must face facts: It’s still very entrenched.
Take, for example, a paper published in 2018 in Sweden. In it, academics Olle Folke and Johanna Rickne write that they studied the effects on marriage of men and women being promoted to a “top job”—the CEO of a company or the mayor of a city, for example.
What they found was that “promotions destabilize women's marriages but not men’s” and that “increases in women’s—but not men’s—earnings are correlated with divorce.” What this suggests is that women in heterosexual marriages can generally tolerate their husband out-earning them. But men can’t tolerate the same when it comes to their wives.
No Easy Fix
Culture is notoriously hard to change. Entrenched bias can take generations to dismantle. But there are some things that can be done to at least chip away at what I’ve come to think of as the power couple paradox.
First, normalizing equally-shared parental leave will start to dismantle the tired man-the-worker vs. woman-the-homemaker dynamic. More companies than ever are offering paternity leave that’s longer than just a week or two. But recent research out of the U.K. shows that even the employers who provide the most generous parental benefits still tend to give mothers far more leave than fathers. The result: Women become the default caregivers, feeding that antiquated stereotype.
A study from 2011 done in Norway, shows that when fathers in heterosexual couples took even just four weeks of parental leave, reports of “conflicts over household division of labor” fell by 11%. Couples where the father took some leave were 50% more likely to equally divide the task of washing clothes than if the father didn’t take any leave at all.
Why is this all relevant? Because behaviors and habits powerfully underpin perceptions of what a woman should and shouldn’t do. So when we start changing how we act, we can also begin to change the way we think and the way we feel, and we can ensure that our collective attitude toward the idea of a professional woman is not eclipsed by an image of a 1950s housewife.
I—for one—think that in this regard we’re heading in the right direction. Sure, in some places there’s a palpable backlash going on against women who want to pursue a career of their own (Hi, Harrison Butker!) but there are other data points too. The proportion of working-age women that are employed in the U.S. is higher than ever before. And although that’s a success that has to be caveated, it’s still a success. It’s still challenging the narrative that a woman’s place in the paid labor market is somehow less deserved than a man’s.
What’s new—and this, to me, really is exciting—is that we’re starting to see occasional counter-examples of what Dr. Biden and Hillary Clinton have had to endure. (Hi, Doug Emhoff, second gentleman of the United States. Did you know he was a partner at one of America’s biggest law firms?)
And these days, headlines about Travis Kelce, the football player for the Kansas City Chiefs, rarely omit his girlfriend’s name. (OK, I’ll say it: Hi, Taylor Swift!)
My favorite example, though, occurred during this summer’s opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics. When rain pelted Serena Williams as she and her family walked the red carpet at the opening ceremony, Laura Woods, a commentator for Eurosport remarked admiringly of Williams: "She looks absolutely incredible. She's got someone just behind [her] holding an umbrella…Those are the levels you aspire to. To have an actual umbrella holder behind you."
The umbrella holder in question? Alexis Ohanian, the multi-millionaire co-founder of Reddit.
One person’s awkward gaffe; another person’s marker of significant cultural change. We have to start somewhere.
Josie Cox is a journalist, author, broadcaster and public speaker. Her book, “WOMEN MONEY POWER: The Rise and Fall of Economic Equality,” was released earlier this year.
Josie Cox
Josie Cox
Emma Haslett
