Academic Dual Career as a Lifeworld Orientation: A Phenomenological Inquiry

Hiring and retaining faculty in dual career partnerships is of increasing concern in academe especially in STEM disciplines. Many universities offer assistance when a prospective faculty member’s partner needs employment. Yet dual career has been framed as a problem that needs to be solved within the existing structures of university employment and academic careers rather than exploring this experience in itself. To ignore dual career as a meaningful context in itself is to miss a critical dimension of how dual career partners experience both their careers and their lives. Accordingly, we take a feminist phenomenological approach to examine dual career as a distinct lived experience. We conducted focus groups with dual career couples in which at least one partner is a faculty member at a STEM-focused research university. Our interpretive analysis yields thematic insights into the meaningfulness of dual career for these couples culminating in the characterization of the experience as “duressed autonomy.” W...