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.

I don't want to get into it further, just to say of course everyone does not have a flexible working co-parent! Lone parenthood, widows/widowers those with caring responsibilities, partners working away, partner being sick, partner dying, disabled, child with significant health problems needing frequent hospital visits, chronic ill-health on either part. I won't even get into the use of international scholars as 'cheaper/lecturer material' on the lower rungs. If you run a 'survival of the fittest' mentality, then academia is not suitable for these people. That's an appalling vision, IMO. I've had more than my share of these, because life isn't fair. But the institutions themselves should be able to take account of these because anyone on here could suddenly be unlucky too.

I'm so jealous of all these people with predictable hours and problem solving skills! In my university, teaching time is arranged centrally based on room availability, so we teach until 8pm 2 nights a week for blocks of 4 months. And no, you can't swap or
get someone else to cover. We also do 2 week blocks of field teaching (plus inevitable paperwork catch up and sickness after), 4-8 weeks of our own fieldwork and it's pretty much mandatory to lead a summerschool for 2-4 weeks. The spouse is expected to bring the kids to the summer school and act like they're happy to get stuck in that location for their holiday. Try problem solving your way out of that. And before you say it, no may be a complete sentence, but that applies to requests for promotions too.

Guess what. I don't know a single woman with children still working, but there are enough men to cover a niche internation field, who get a free pass to drink and sleep with the students on their months long adventures as single men.

@HandScreen I think you being deliberately obtuse and quite nasty. 'Literally every other academic' finds balancing work and childcare 'quite easy'? Really?!

I am an academic. My teaching is in the evenings. My other half works 12 hour shifts in a hospital. I am expected to travel at least 3 times a year, would be more if I could, as my childless colleagues do. It is hardly 'incredibly niche' to need to travel for 2 months in the summer. Ever heard of anthropology? Or historians using overseas archives? My career would categorically not have been possible without family support.

Balancing work and childcare, especially on an ECR salary, especially in an expensive city (where the jobs are) is not a 'basic logistical problem', you patronising person.