News Release

Academic couples at same university are happier

Peer-Reviewed Publication

Cornell University

ITHACA, N.Y. -- When they work at the same university, highly educated couples with children report much more job, marriage and family satisfaction and less stress balancing the demands of work and family than other dual-earner professional couples where one spouse works at a university and the other works elsewhere. They also say they have more egalitarian partnerships in which neither partner's career takes priority, according to a new study at Cornell University.

"Rather than work and family pulling from one another, co-working tends to support a positive synergy resulting from intimate connections between work and family lives that buffer the strains common among dual-earner couples," says Stephen Sweet, associate director of the Cornell Careers Institute: An Alfred P. Sloan Center for the Study of Working Families. He has co-authored a new study on co-working couples at universities with Phyllis Moen, founding director of the institute and professor of human development and sociology at Cornell. The sociologists presented their study at the World Congress of Sociology July 9 in Brisbane, Australia.

In particular, the researchers found that although co-working men (especially those with dependent children at home) work six hours more per week than other men and thus have a stronger work commitment, they also report greater family success and less negative "spillover" stress from home to work (that is, taking stress from home to the office) than other men do.

Co-working women are highly satisfied as well; co-working women with advanced degrees report the highest family and marital satisfaction when compared with other women. Women with school-age children who work at the same university as their husbands work fewer hours than other women and report greater family success, greater success balancing family and higher marital satisfaction than other working women with school-age children.

"Our findings suggest that co-working is an effective strategy and a win-win for both couples and the universities employing them," says Sweet. "As a result, we think that colleges and universities have to be increasingly considerate of dual-earner couples, as it is extremely common that one academic is married to another."Although existing research indicates that about 40 percent of male faculty and 35 percent of women faculty are married to other academics, seldom have dual-career policies or practices in academic environments been evaluated. Sweet's and Moen's study is one of the first to offer a formal assessment of the effects of employing spouses, and on the whole their findings suggest positive outcomes.

Their study, based on an analysis of 276 couples in which at least one spouse works for one of two universities in upstate New York, is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. "Highly educated people tend to be married to people very much like themselves," points out Moen. "Those who can find two jobs in the same place often feel lucky. We find it can enhance their two occupational careers along with their family career." Of their sample, one in seven couples had both partners working at the same university.

Among their other findings:

  • Co-working is a common career strategy among dual earner couples.

  • Co-working couples at the two universities tend to be older and more educated than couples working elsewhere.

  • Couples in which both spouses have graduate degrees are twice as likely to be co-working than couples in which one or neither has an advanced degree.

  • Co-working couples are considerably more likely to place an equal priority on both partners' careers and are less inclined to favor the husband's job over that of the wife, compared with non-co-working couples.

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