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.

Very sincerely here - how would you explain the sex ratio of academics? I'm in my thirties so havnt had the benefit of so much experience yet.

Very sincerely here - how would you explain the sex ratio of academics?

This has been already studied to death. Whenever women are asked to keep a diary of the amount of work-at-home they do versus their husbands, the ratio is always at least 2 to 1 - and usually more.

For some reason, women like to wildly overestimate how much life work men ACTUALLY do.

I quite my job to move for my DH jobs twice. He'd obviously not be where he is if I didn't. I spoke to my very senior female leader in my second job (in a uni) about this very topic and she said that her DH quit his job for her to pursue her career early on. He raised their DC mostly and she has him to thank for her success. She gave me a lot of good advice and the benefit of her experience, but she was very clear that success in the arena relies heavily on sacrifice of the OHs.

There is research somewhere showing that mothers and fathers only do the same amount of work at home (chores/childcare) if the mum is working and the dad is a SAHP. In all other scenarios, the woman does more.

That's fair, and you're right of course. SAHPs are not boring. I would still struggle if my partner chose this path, though, as having values and a work ethic that are aligned is important to me. Work is exciting, and I've loved watching how it has made us both grow throughout the years. I don't think a SAHP would have developed and grown in the same way, as they simply would not have faced the levels of responsibility and devision making and horizon stretching that are provided in an exciting career.

@newstart1234 I was specifically responding to the poster who said she had never seen male academics take time off for childcare purposes.

My opinions on the numbers would be just that - my opinion.

I don't disagree that, overwhelmingly Mums do FAR more of the mental load and quite often the practical load of housekeeping and parenting when both parents are in paid employment, I just disagree with this "never" scenario. Or at least, will assert that isn't my experience.

*decision making, not division making!

I think we just work in different areas. It sounds like both you and your DH work office hours. I work all hours in healthcare and my DH on big engineering projects - about 4 sites across europe - about 1 in 4 weeks he's away at them. Of course, we both think we are typical because we are typical of those around us. I could not possibly work in my chosen career without occasional overnight and ad hoc child care (family support basically) and you could. It's really very basic.

@newstart1234 but this thread is about academia. I am an academic. I have been illustrating that family support is not needed nearby, nor is a SAHP, to have a highly successful career in academia.

Of course it's possible. I totally believe you. It's down to luck (here, you're lucky your partner works in their chosen field office hours for example) The point of the thread is the tendency male academics being supported by partners and the associated issues. I think my situation is more typical - if my dh worked in another area I could have carried on my career fine - business medicine law etc offer either more flexibility re location or better salaries. The surviving relationships in academia are overwhelmingly where one partner compromises a lot and the other very little. Resulting in it being dominated my often self centred men.

I'm sure I've heard that academics have the highest divorce rate of various professions...

I'm genuinely shocked to hear of academics married to each other. I can only think they've either met and married later in life, or lived apart while building their careers and been lucky to eventually found permanent jobs in the same city or nearby. To start and rise thorough the ranks at the same unis would be incredible. I do know two married professors but they met and married late 40s/50s.

Just not true. The situation you describe where your husband needs to travel overseas for work every few weeks is not at all typical - that's actually very unusual.

Of the 100s of academics I work with, I can think of only a handful where an academic's partner has no career (SAHP) and none that have a partner whose career has taken a back seat.

At some point, you need to own your own successes or failures to progress in your career. It is not typical of academics' partners that they have an unsuccessful career (quite the opposite, in fact).

We'll have to agreed to disagree. I'm not sure i know 100 people though, let alone their partners' level of professional success/satisfaction - fair doos. It's true however that academia is absolutely dominated by men and I think it's worth thinking about why. - my opinion the reward structure favours men - there are very successful woman including you though! Also, I may be younger than the colleagues you're thinking of . I'm sure by 40/50 there won't be any noticeable difference to my career. And finally, I'm from Scandinavia I think woman have higher expectations of life - eg I don't think any woman would think it's reasonable to compromise on various things eg delaying parenthood, living separately, changing career/job, having no lesiumre time in a way that outside the nordics people would think is a fair compromise. So different perspective in sum

The surviving relationships in academia are overwhelmingly where one partner compromises a lot and the other very little. Resulting in it being dominated my often self centred men.

I'll fix it for you .......'In your apparently very limited experience......'

I agree with Handscreen.
Now, don't get me wrong, I think any of us, whatever our profession, could be more available and more flexible to be 'present' at work, if we didn't have dc. However, your assertation that academia is full of men married to SAH women, is just bonkers. Or observed in one very small, limited circle which isn't enough you make a generalisation from. Like @HandScreen I can think of dozens upon dozens upon dozens, and potentially into hundreds of academics I've met over the years, so seem to have a wider perspective that you.

I'm genuinely shocked to hear of academics married to each other.

The majority of women in STEM fields such as physics are married to other academics in nearby fields. This thread seems to generalise particular experiences from particular domains of academia across all subject areas, with no evidence.

By the way it is the norm in a number of STEM fields to move between different institutions/countries for some years before getting a permanent position - and researchers rarely have children before getting permanent posts. So it is not the case that academic couples in such domains grow up through the same institution and stay there all their careers.

I'm still with the OP - she didn't say it was all or even most men, but that this is a recognisable type of man and family pattern, still fairly prominent in academia, and that it's a problem for everyone because the expectations associated with a successful academic career haven't changed to reflect the fact that academics now can't or don't want to be in one-salary families. I think policies and work cultures are changing - even within my own institution - but I notice this pattern quite a lot in my department and faculty and I think it's because there are quite a few of these types of men in positions of power. So for example the promotions criteria might have changed, but that hasn't (yet) changed the culture in my department, where people (especially women) are not encouraged to go for promotion unless they fit the manager's view of what success looks like.

I also wonder if it depends on where you live a bit - my institution is not convenient for other highly skilled careers - it's small and not well-connected geographically. Within my department, I can think of at least two female administrators who work there because their husbands are academics, four male academics whose wives also have PhDs but work (if at all) in lower-paid teaching-focused roles (of whom three have children), and just one successful female professor whose husband is a stay-at-home parent by choice. Maybe in a larger city, with better access to other universities and professional workplaces it might look different?

the opposite in my department. The vast majority of male colleagues, either work part time or have taken significant backseats in their careers whilst their female partners work in massively high, paying city jobs in the financial and computing sectors, and on six-figure salaries.

Out of them I can think of about four men who have taken extended shared parental leave. Thanks to their wives salaries and have taken on primary caring of their children even after the children have entered primary school.

I'm genuinely shocked to hear of academics married to each other.

Really? It’s fairly common in my department (STEM) for colleagues to be married to fellow academics within this institution or others. I am married to a colleague.

A lot of what I have read on this thread is alien to me.

I didn't make that assertion.

It's not true in the UK that "academia is absolutely dominated by men". Almost half of academics are female. What is true is that as you move up the academic ranks, the gender ratio skews more and more in the favour of men. Also some disciplines are dominated by men, as some disciplines are dominated by women.

Logically, it makes sense that many academics would be married to other academics. Academics will know far more people who are academics than they will know people from other professions (excluding students) and this will be the case from PhD-age onwards. Their shared profession also gives them something in common.

Approximately half of the academics in my department have a partner who is also an academic, mostly in the same or an allied discipline. The second largest group is people without a partner.

As an undergrad, it was seemingly 85% female and the staff was 85% male. We even had a running joke about it 'no prizes for guessing who's gonna make it to professor' etc I do have limited experience compared to older people obvs but I simply don't believe that anyone can have a good knowledge of hundreds of colleagues partners career progression. I don't by any mean think all men have sah wives that obviously ridiculous. I said the demands of the job (salary and repeated relocation, often international) means that it's a career that requires more than average compromise on the spouses part 🤔

Which favours men. The professor gender bias is especially shocking when you do consider the phd population. I think it 55% female. By professor it's about 28%

It's dominated in the sense that the leadership is mostly men

With all respect @HandScreen its great that you’ve managed this, but are you also stating that you believe that you’re the rule in academia, not an exception?

Perhaps I’m the exception? Unequivocally I could not have maintained an academic career without my in-laws providing child support for when my DC were ill over the years. Moreover, in my department it is certainly the norm that those progressing are those with wider family support (two academic spouses) or those with spouses with PT flexible jobs or even, sadly, divorced parents with childfree weeks etc.

Ultimately, whilst neither of us ought to universalise the personal, there is still the matter of research identifying the low numbers of female professors compared to men.