Sociology Plus
Dual-Career Marriage Definition
A dual-career marriage is a marriage in which both partners pursue occupational careers — positions offering security, progression, and prospects of advancement — rather than merely holding jobs. Such marriages remain relatively rare, and findings about them may not generalize to dual-earner families, in which both partners are formally employed but only one — usually the man — pursues a career; it is the dual-earner pattern that has become the norm.
The Double Shift
Empirical studies suggest that the distinction between career women and women in less rewarding jobs matters less than might be expected in one crucial respect: both appear to work a double shift, combining home and work responsibilities. Whatever the status of a woman’s employment, primary responsibility for domestic labor tends to remain hers, so that occupational demands are layered on top of household ones rather than traded against them.
Sociological Significance
The dual-career marriage has attracted research attention out of proportion to its numbers because it isolates, in its purest form, the tension between egalitarian aspiration and domestic reality. Where both partners hold careers of equal seriousness, questions that other households can settle by default — whose work takes precedence, who accommodates whom when children arrive, whose advancement justifies a household move — must be explicitly negotiated. Studies of such marriages have therefore illuminated the persistence of gendered assumptions even among couples formally committed to equality, and the institutional obstacles (inflexible career timetables, employer expectations of an unencumbered worker) that make genuinely symmetrical arrangements difficult to sustain. The concept connects closely with the domestic division of labor and with the Rapoports’ related notion of the dual career family.