When Your Partner Isn’t Giving You the Support You Need | Women at Work | Podcast

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You're listening to Women at Work from Harvard Business Review. I'm Amy Bernstein.

I'm Amy Gallo. If you've been listening to our show for a while or reading our newsletter, you know that we regularly ask listeners and readers to tell us about the workplace challenges they're facing. And this one particular email landed in our inbox recently about a dilemma that we think is very relatable and yet rarely discussed.

The woman who wrote that email gave us permission to read it out loud. Here it goes: "Hello. I'm not sure this has been covered before, but I personally am being challenged in a way that may be an issue for others as well. It's difficult to get my husband to wholeheartedly support my career and its development. He's an excellent partner, we make a great team, and he absolutely intends to be supportive, but when I face additional demands from my job, he tends to grumble a bit about the longer hours or extra stress I'm experiencing." And then she gives some background about her career and family life. She's in biotech working in research and development. She and her husband have been married for seven years and have two kids. He's an attorney and earns a higher salary than she does, but her total compensation package is larger and includes the family health insurance. After their first baby, she switched from the technical scientist track to program management in order to have greater control over her schedule and be able to work from home more often. "I'm not underpaid, underappreciated, or unhappy in my career," she writes. "We generally communicate openly and well. There's never been an expectation or desire for me to be a stay-at-home parent, yet if I need to travel for a day or two or if I need to work past 5:00 PM, he grouses." She goes on to say that when she's earned promotions in the past, they've discussed how to manage the additional demands together. "He still doesn't seem to understand how to support my career development," she continues, "which can make me feel as though he's being dismissive. I'm wondering if it's a result of some unconscious bias. His own mother never desired or pursued a career outside the home and cared for him