Male academics with wives/partners who don't work. Anyone else noticed this?

[Eglantiny]

First, I'll start with an apology
I'm not generalizing to all male academics. I'm sure there are some good ones out there.
And I'm not intending any shade on the women I'm talking about at all.

But I'm getting increasingly frustrated with male academics who have female wives/partners who either don't work, or who work in "non-professional" jobs.

I've noticed a few things about these men.
Firstly, they have high expectations of what an academic career should look like, and/or what's a reasonable set of outputs over a particular period of time.
I think this is simply because they have more time and headspace for actually getting stuff done because they've delegate life admin and responsibility to someone else.

Secondly, they don't give much of a shit about teaching and measure academic success on research alone.
I think this is because teaching relies on soft-skills, organisation, relationships etc. which they don't value or excel at, so assume isn't important.

Thirdly, they surround themselves with other odious men with similar approaches to life and academia.
I think this is partly affinity (we all want to be around people similar to us) but also because these men manufacture time/space to build networks that exclude others - after-work drinks, evening seminars, conference events etc.

Fourthly, they have a strange way of working with women. It's hard to pinpoint exactly but I find they only tend to work with women who are either super-big-time professors or early-career researchers.
I'm not too sure what my theory is for this. Maybe they don't see women as their professional equals. I think they work with big-time professors who can offer them something, and ECRs who they can be in charge of.

Fifthly, this only really applies to the social sciences disciplines but these men don't actually do much empirical research with people. They are good at spouting theory and at running quantitative models, but they do much less human data collection.
I think this is because human data collection relies on soft-skills which they don't have and don't value. They see theorizing and number-crunching as 'proper' academic research. I do also think some of them are quite insecure about being social science academics and try to get close to STEM-type methods.

Has anyone else noticed this ?

There's quite a lot of these men in my Department - RG, social sciences - and I just find them generally tiresome to deal with.

Perhaps you are in my department!

I have found a few men who are not so like this, and I collaborate with them and only them. They either promote women or promote their wife's careers or both. The rest, no thanks!

I suspect you will find the same in every profession tbh.

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Perhaps you might think about why their wives don't have high flying careers???

How about moving every 3 years or so to different countries, how about them working 12 hour days, how about them needing to work away/conferences/collaborations on different continents all the time. I couldn't work in a job that wasn't flexible, school hours and changing frequently never helps careers. Oh and I have an autistic dd.

How about thinking about why rather than making assumptions?

You have misunderstood the post. It's not saying the wives are doing anything wrong. Just that the men are only able to do what they do because their wives are picking up the slack. They then expect everyone else who doesn't have someone picking up the slack to have the same amount of time to dedicate to work as they do.

Yes exactly. I have several lovely male colleagues whose wives were/are SAHM or very PT and while they're very nice and speak very fondly of their DC, they've clearly never done the daily mad rush from work to nursery pick up juggling type stuff that families with two working parents do.

I think this is partly affinity (we all want to be around people similar to us) but also because these men manufacture time/space to build networks that exclude others - after-work drinks, evening seminars, conference events etc

This is normal in all sorts of work environments. Unfortunately. 😡 My daughters are already experiencing it at large financial companies.
The charity day at one of them is a 'golf day' - I know plenty of women play golf but in practice it ends up being men and a few older women. Imagine if they had a spa charity day?

Male partners having golf days with younger staff who ALL happen to be male is divisive.

These companies might talk-the-talk but unfortunately old habits die hard.

@DoAWheelie and @JenniferBarkley
You've encapsulated it perfectly, thank you.

@Maltaw Absolutely. And how frustrating and disappointing for your daughter. It's not only inherently sexist but also very ableist - walking around a golf course all day is hell for people with mobility issues.

This certainly rings some bells.

My male colleagues don't conform to all of the characteristics you outline, and are generally collegial and supportive, but I have noticed that many of their partners work in non-professional or very much PT jobs. It certainly makes a tricky dynamic at times, especially as my own partner's job is even more demanding than my own.

Are you watching reruns of Morse and Lewis? 🤣

While this is true in many professions (as a PP points out), I think it's particularly noticeable in academia because so much of the job/career is still structured around the model of the (male) Oxbridge don with a wife at home to look after the children and do the entertaining. All the things that get you promoted are the conferences, seminars, networking etc., and although there are are now policies in place at many universities to support work-life balance, they're very much add-ons rather than fundamental changes in expectations for what makes a successful academic. Also many academics never take their full annual leave entitlement and spend their summers doing research, while if you are a parent (and it's usually mothers) you need the AL to cover school holidays.

I recognise this from professional services firms too. Well intentioned questions like ‘why are you always in the car at 8:30 when we have the group call’ me ‘because I have to drop the DC to the childminder’ he ‘oh, yes, err, my wife deals with all that’….grrrrr

Spot on. As is the original post.

Yes, thank you. I was struggling to formulate and articulate why I think it's quite specific to male academics. I mean, I agree it absolutely happens in other fields of work but I think the level of autonomy in academia really contributes to the situation.

Yup, sounds familiar in science too.

There are actually two categories that I've observed: older staff, male and female with stay at home spouses. They don't recognise that junior salaries aren't enough for a sole breadwinner. Younger staff seem disproportionately to have high earning spouses. The academia is a hobby job, with the academic being a bit the trophy partner with the brains to compliment the financially successful one. They can buy in all the support needed. The ones without quit or starve.

Entry requirements should now be PhD, a zillion publications and financial independence.

I see you’ve met my dh then

Its funny because in academia, no-one would ever schedule a routine, UK-only call for 8:30am because they'd get into bother for EDI and work-life balance issues, particularly the impact on parents.

As another PP has said, universities are very good at creating policies which look to address equality and work-life balance but don't actually address some of the fundamentals of the sector.

Do you never feel envious that you never get to swan off on fancy conferences abroad, are stuck with poorly paid part time work opportunities and the onus is on you to work around him? Because same girl but I'm not happy about it x

I think you may have selected a subset of male academics who do match the characteristics you set out, and that you want to have a moan about them.

Fair enough to have the moan, since men like that are annoying (whatever profession they are in). But I don't think that what you say works as a generalisation about male academics.

My DH is an academic and doesn't meet your specs. For one thing he has explicitly contracted out of research and focusses on teaching, which he does well and very conscientiously.

I think that menioning the female partners of the academics that annoy you is a bit of a red herring (and slightly offensive). Of course male professionals whose partners take on the burden of most of the parenting and home management have an unfair advantage, which is aggravating, but it is a stretch to imagine that the employment status of these female partners has anything whatsoever to do with the other annoying things about the men that you mention. And it unfairly conjours up a picture of these women as some kind of Stepform Wife stereotype.

For what its worth, I was a much more high-flying and successful academic than DH, but I crashed and burned with severe depression and then took on freelance editorial work that did result in me being the main parent and home manager. It isn't realistic to imagine that such chance variables correlate with the wide range of male-academic personal failings that you list. What would explain such a correlation? That economically underproductive women are drawn towards shitty men?

Yes having moved from the financial services to academia, it's interesting.

The career is infinitely more flexible and aware of meeting timings etc. I would definitely have had to go PT by now in my old job because I simply couldn't make it to nursery by 6 if I left the office at 5. And I never left the office at 5.

But, the flexibility also creates a 24/7 environment - you have every hour of the day to do the work, no one cares when. So, some (me!) will just about squeeze in FT hours because of their other commitments. Others will work those 24/7 hours and so of course they are the ones that will progress.

@Random789 I do see what you mean but I don't think the OP was being offensive to notice a pattern. I work in a very inconveniently-located institution and there are a LOT more couples who have been together since they were students, but where it's the woman who's given up her chances of an academic career to follow her husband to the middle of nowhere for his career. Some work in professional services at the university, often part-time, or do bits and pieces of casual teaching. I can only think of two couples where it's the other way round.

Yes, @DrMalinki there crtainly are couples like that, and it certainly does amount to an unfair advantage for many male academics (which the male academics often don't notice or acknowledge). But to correlate it with characteristics such as lacking soft skills, preferring STEM-type research methods, undervaluing teaching, being unable to work effectively with women as equals, and surrounding themselves with "other odious men" is WAAAY out of order.

@Random789 okay, fair enough - but on the other hand... I see a lot of men like that in senior management roles where I work. One manager recently suggested to a female colleague at an appraisal meeting that she try being more like two male colleagues in the department if she wanted to progress...

Totally agree OP. It’s one of the reasons I left.
Amongst younger academics with children, I noticed many examples of the following 2 scenarios:

Some of my male (and female too) colleagues had well-off parents who bought a house for them outright meaning they had no mortgage and it was much easier to live off an academics salary. It also meant their spouse could either not work or have a part-time or ‘hobby’ job.

And many of my female counterparts seemed to routinely have their mothers come and live with them and basically do all childcare and household chores so they didn’t need to worry about school pick-ups etc and could easily do conferences abroad etc.

These people definitely found academia easiest and most other people seemed to struggle to varying degrees. Neither option was available to me and was a definite factor in choosing my current career which is well paid and has fairly set hours with no expectations outside that to attend evening/weekend events/seminars etc.