Dual Career Couples

Dual Career Couples

A traditional-career family is usually a household where only one of the members is working (in most of the cases, the husband) while the other (typically the wife) stays at home as a home-maker (Aswathappa & Dash 2008). As more women enter the workforce, they are becoming better educated and taking professional and executive positions (Aswathappa & Dash 2008). As a result, dual career couples have become more common. Beeing in dual career couple means, that you and your (life) partner both have a professional career characterized by strong commitment, personal growth, and increasing levels of responsibility (Scullion, H 2006). In contrast to “Two-person career families”, where both of the partners are focused on one of the members future, “Dual career couples” are partnerships in which both husband and wife focus intently on their own careers (Scullion, H 2006). Observations show some interesting results. For example, “fathers involved in “Dual career couple” are less prone to exhibit stereotypic behaviors (providing children with more positive parenting role) and also “children who observes their mother as economically independent, with choices and opportunities can gain a perception of what can do and achieve” (Zunker, 2006). Managing the “Dual career couple” is one of the top five challenges for IHR managers.

“Dual career couples” are often described as a barrier to international mobility. Therefore, they are “emerging as a major constraint on the ability of MNCs to implement their internationalisation strategy” (Scullion, H 2006). This barrier is mainly characterized by the fact that families are less willing to accept any intervention in personal and social lives related to international assignments. The main reasons for that are that spouses face problems such as: the trailing spouse having to abandon his/her career, the inability the trailing spouse’s