Zoom Age Can Boost Two-Career Couples

It takes considerable time for us to figure out the innovations that are made possible by new technology. Zoom-like communication programs are a major innovation that the personal computer and the internet made possible.

The COVID pandemic accelerated developments that otherwise might have taken much longer. Like many other Americans, I became intimately acquainted with Zoom.

Before the Zoom age, two-career couples often found it hard to find jobs in the same location. This was especially a problem in small towns.

Sometimes this forced a couple to make difficult decisions.

During my early years at Adrian College, a fellow political scientist at another small Michigan college was married to Barbara, an ordained minister who also had a Ph.D.in American church history. She taught some classes at Joe's college, but was never given the opportunity to compete for a full-time tenured position.

My wife and I were more fortunate at Adrian College, where Doris became a full-time tenured professor of accounting. There were several other couples who also benefited from Adrian's flexibility. Adrian College itself, and its students, benefited greatly from this flexibility.

As Joe recently told me, "from the beginning of our marriage the explicit agreement between us was equal occupational opportunity." With this covenant in mind, they moved to Chicago, where Barbara found a position teaching at a seminary and Joe joined the faculty at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

It helped that Chicago is a big city with multiple academic institutions..

This was a happy outcome. But many couples were not so fortunate.

Today's two career couples still face major challenges, but the possibility of remote work has at least enlarged their opportunities. They can now locate where one of them finds a good job, and the other one can join the millions of other Americans working from home through Zoom or similar software.

With today's technology, Joe might have been able to continue teaching at the Michigan college while accompanying Barbara to Chicago.

But, ironically, if remote teaching had been possible back then, Joe might have missed out on his very interesting and varied subsequent careers. After years teaching at the Chicago seminary, Barbara was offered a step up to a deanship at at different seminary, and Joe ultimately found a deanship of his own at the new location.

Later, Barbara was offered the presidency of another seminary, and Joe found employment as a researcher at the nearby Connecticut Department of Higher Education.

As I see it, teaching in person is much more attractive work, including informal relations with students and fellow teachers. If Joe had continued working at his first college, teaching remotely, he would probably have had a much less satisfying career.

Other professions, such as the practice of law or certain aspects of medicine, may lend themselves better to remote work.

Decades ago, I invented a word — dilematunity — to point to the fact that opportunities usually come with problems and, conversely, problems often come with new opportunities or make us aware of existing opportunities to which we previously had been blind.

Accordingly , technology allowing people to live one place and work some place else also brings complications. People may be liable for taxes in more than one state. Professional licensing — generally handled at the state level — may require getting licenses from more than one state.

And the popularity of working from home has undermined investments in office buildings, since there are fewer people working in them.

As Joe and Barbara's experience suggests, it might not always be a good idea to take advantage of every new opportunity created by modern technology. But all in all, the age of Zoom has been a gift, one of the few upsides to a pandemic which has caused so much damage to so many lives.