Couples That Work

APPENDIX

Studying Dual-Career Couples

In the summer of 2011, Gianpiero and I packed up our house in France, crammed as much as we could into four oversized suitcases, and boarded a flight to Boston with our two (then small) children in our arms. We were off to spend a year at Harvard Business School, Gianpiero as a visiting professor and I a postdoctoral fellow. As we adjusted to our new world, I became hooked on following the social narratives I encountered in the US media. It was the period following Sheryl Sandberg’s landmark Ted Talk, “Why We Have Too Few Women Leaders,” which sparked the book Lean In. One of Sandberg’s famous catch-phrases, “The most important career decision you will make is who you marry,” caught the collective imagination. ...