Sociology Plus
Dual Career Families Definition
Dual career families are families in which both parents in a nuclear family are employed in occupations offering the possibility of advancement. The term was introduced by Rhona and Robert Rapoport (1971; 1976) to designate families in which both husband and wife have careers properly so called — and such families should be distinguished from those in which both partners are merely in paid work, without the relative job security and promotional prospects that define a career.
A Postwar Development
The appearance of significant numbers of dual career families has been one of the notable social developments of the postwar period, made possible by women’s rising educational attainment and their entry into professional and managerial occupations. Its consequences reach deep into family life: where both partners pursue advancement, conjugal roles must be renegotiated rather than assumed, and child care must be deliberately planned around two working lives rather than fitted to a single breadwinner’s schedule.
Significance and Tensions
Sociologists have treated the dual career family as a test case for claims about the modern “symmetrical” family, since it poses in sharpest form the question of whether domestic labor is genuinely shared when both partners hold demanding jobs. Research findings temper any optimism: even in dual career households, women typically retain primary responsibility for the home and children, effectively working a double shift that combines occupational and domestic obligations. The pattern also raises practical dilemmas that have become staples of work–family research — whose career takes priority when relocation beckons, how career timetables collide with childbearing decisions, and how couples manage the competing time demands of two “greedy” occupations. The concept thus connects closely with debates on the domestic division of labor and the dual role of women.