Equal Partners?: How Dual-Professional Couples Make Career, Relationship, and Family Decisions

Many young professionals seek egalitarian partnerships in which both partners work for pay and share unpaid housework and childcare. Yet working couples' realities often deviate from this ideal, with women trading off employment for family care. Will contemporary young adults repeat this pattern, or will they come closer to achieving equality in work and family? Equal Partners? seeks to explore this question.

Drawing on six years of interviews with the partners in twenty—one different—gend...