During my talk at WiAC a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that the two-body problem is one of the challenges that face mid-career women. The two-body problem is about couples who both have careers. Throughout your career, you have different opportunities that present themselves to you. These opportunities have to be evaluated as to how they impact your career and the rest of your life. This evaluation becomes more difficult when you are in a relationship, because “the rest of your life” is more complex. There are more tradeoffs to consider, and sometimes furthering one party’s goals comes at the expense of the other’s goals. Further, given that there are two people with two careers, this problem presents itself more frequently.
My husband and I are both software engineers, and the two-body problem is one that we face constantly. For example, we have both passed on job opportunities that would require relocation or too much travel. While the opportunity might have been great for our careers, it would have had too much of a negative impact on our personal lives.
In our culture, it had long been expected that a woman’s career would take the back seat to that of her husband. Consider rocket scientist Yvonne Brill, winner of a NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal, whose New York Times obituary notes that she followed her husband’s career. This expectation is changing, slowly, but it still impacts many women. I’m lucky in that my husband doesn’t believe that my career is of lesser importance than his, and our families also feel this way.
For us, we handle the two-body problem by having an ongoing conversation about what we want, both personally and professionally. We try to make sure that we’re equally balancing each of our career growth, as well as considering the impact of our professional decisions on our personal lives. These are not easy conversations to have. It can be hard to talk about what we want to accomplish in our careers, and it can be even harder to talk about places where we feel like we aren’t making as much headway as we want. They’re hard conversations, but important ones.
I assume what makes these conversations most difficult is that one partner may have an opportunity in City X while the other partner has an opportunity in City Y. This is yet another area where remote workforce concepts can really have a strong impact on a company’s ability to hire and retain the best workers.
Imagine how much less painful those conversations would be between partners if physical location of the job wasn’t a factor. Then you could further your career without it having a negative impact on the career of your husband.
It’s not just about whether one partner has an opportunity in one location and another partner has an opportunity in another location. There is also the question of where the two people, as a couple, want to live and work. If one partner gets a position in City X but either of them doesn’t want to live there, or both of them want to live there, then they have to figure out together how they will handle the situation. In other words, career discussions are not just about what one partner wants. Career discussions are about what both partners want in their personal and professional lives. Considering whether an opportunity is good both for the individual and the relationship is not just about the location. Other factors include the location itself, what impact the new opportunity will have on the personal and professional life of the partner, and how that impacts the life of their partner.
Physical location not being a factor does not resolve the vast majority of the issues that face a two-career household. Location is only the tip of the iceberg, and we have to recognize that so that two-career households have an opportunity to flourish.
In 1997 I listened to a talk at UIST about telepresence and video conferencing, both very nascent technologies at the time. The speaker made an observation that I think still plays out today where telepresence is fairly mature. The observation was that there is a great deal of benefits that come from being in the same room as the person you are working with. Video conferencing/telepresence is not realistically going to be able to replicate these benefits. Therefore, the speaker predicted that business travel will still happen but that telepresence/video conferencing will be utilized, not for business purposes, but to keep in touch with the business traveller’s life outside of work while on a business trip.