Like men, these women occasionally spoke of the burdens and worries
accompanying supporting a family but also experienced the satisfac-
tion of providing. A woman in her upper-30s described:

I never expected to earn this much money. I think it has to do with being
a woman. But it feels really good to write the checks each month, and to
see that I can help take care of our family.

Let us consider a snapshot of the two careers developing side by side
under a single roof. The spouses interact with each other's careers in a
number of ways. They talk extensively about their work with each
other, sometimes providing guidance about career directions as well as
advice about handling day-to-day office politics and substantive ques-
tions. Gender differences emerge in both the quantity and quality of
work talk. Wives talk about their work more than husbands. Husbands
are more prone than wives to give advice about work-related matters,
whereas wives are more likely to focus on socioemotional dimensions
of work situations. Geographic moves, which comprise a crucial di-
mension along which spouses can help or hinder each other's careers,
continue on average to favor the husband's career. However, a substan-
tial proportion of couples now organize geographic moves around the
wife's career as well.

Dual-career spouses provide a live-in point of comparison that ap-
pears most likely to generate competitive feelings when one career is
not going well. We find that women feel uncomfortable surpassing
their husbands in success and that men may feel especially sensitive to
issues of comparative income. The enduring expectation is for the
man's career to be more important: to earn more money, be more
successful, dictate more geographic moves. Importantly, the hus-
band's career also tended to become established before the wife's, due
to his earlier choice of a career path and his more immediate move into
graduate education. Husband's and wife's ambitions appear somewhat
different: He is more likely than she to set highly specific career goals
and to have expected to be further along in his career by this point.

Interdependent with the dual developing careers is the shared family
life of the two spouses. Many men felt their careers were hindered by
their wives' expectations that they help with domestic work, whereas
many wives felt that their husbands' lack of involvement at home
burdened their careers. Some women also appreciated the ways their
careers were facilitated by their husbands' contributions to family
work. We now turn to a fuller examination of these interrelationships of
the worlds of work and family.

-91-