The Myth of Mutuality

1230555
research-article2024
GASXXX10.1177/08912432241230555GENDER & SOCIETY / MonthWong and Daminger / THE MYTH OF MUTUALITY
THE MYTH OF MUTUALITY
Decision-Making, Marital Power, and

the Persistence of Gender Inequality
Jaclyn S. Wong
University of South Carolina, USA
Allison Daminger
University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA
Invisible power—the ability to resist changing one’s behavior because of an unspoken

consensus that the status quo is natural or inevitable—upholds gender inequality in
different-gender marriages. Yet the “consensus” that Aafke Komter documented more
than 30 years ago—one in which both men and women endorsed male primacy and
believed it natural for women to enjoy housework and men to pursue professional ambi-
tion—has weakened among the college-educated, upper middle class. We ask: What is
the new consensus upholding gendered power imbalances among contemporary highly
educated couples? We draw on 112 interviews with members of 44 such couples making
career and family decisions to update theorizing on invisible power. Examination of
decision-making processes and outcomes across work and family domains over time,
including in cases of apparent agreement, reveals the consensus now upholding men’s
interests to be couples’ conviction they are practicing mutuality. Partners’ belief that
they are mutually pursuing both individuals’ and the family’s best interests by emphasiz-
ing “us” and balancing a decision portfolio helps them overlook unsuccessful attempts
Authors’ note: Both authors thank the respondents who generously contributed their
time and shared their stories with us. We are grateful for the incisive feedback of Sasha
Killewald, Ellen Lamont, Monica Liu, Isabel Nuñez Salazar, Abigail Ocobock, Ariane
Ophir, Joanna Pepin, Richard Petts, Jessi Streib, Jocelyn Viterna, and participants in the
2021 ASA Annual Meeting and the UW-Madison FemSem. The first author also thanks
Yonatan Kogan for serving as a regular sounding board for nascent ideas. The second
author received funding from the Weatherhead Initiative on Gender Inequality at Harvard
University and from the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone PhD Fellowship in Inequality
and Wealth Concentration. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed
to Jaclyn S. Wong, University of South Carolina, 911 Pickens Street, Columbia, SC 29208,
USA: e-mail: wongjs@mailbox.sc.edu.
GENDER & SOCIETY, Vol 38 No. 2, April, 2024 157–186
https://doi.org/10.1177/08912432241230555
DOI: 10.1177/08912432241230555
© 2024 by The Author(s)
Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions
158 GENDER & SOCIETY / April 2024
to minimize power imbalances. Progress toward gender equality among different-gender

couples will likely remain stalled as long as efforts to practice mutuality overshadow
critical evaluation of their success.
Keywords: marital power; household labor; gender inequality; decision-making
P ower relations are fundamental to sociological inquiry on different-

gender couples’ marital and family dynamics, including dating (Lamont
2020), cohabiting (Miller and Carlson 2016), housework (Daminger 2019;
Tichenor 2005), balancing careers (Wong 2023), and parenting (Moore
2008). Consistent evidence of women’s greater domestic labor burden and
limited career freedom indicates that gendered marital power imbalances
persist in work and family (Damaske 2011, 2021; Perry-Jenkins and
Gerstel 2020).
Komter’s (1989) tripartite conception of marital power as manifest,
latent, or invisible is a key framework for studying gendered power ine-
qualities. Manifest power emerges in disagreement, when one spouse
advocates change and the other resists. Latent power operates without
visible conflict, when the less-powerful person anticipates opposition and
becomes resigned or resentful rather than raising an issue. Finally, invis-
ible power is the ability to resist change because of a shared, unspoken
consensus that a power-imbalanced situation is natural.
Undoubtedly, all three forms of power shape contemporary couples’
interactions. But the antagonistic nature of manifest and latent power con-
tradicts widespread ideals of equal, companionate marriage among the
young, college-educated, upper middle class (Cherlin 2004; Gerson 2011;
Lamont 2020). Thus, invisible power is key to understanding gender-
unequal marital outcomes. Yet the underlying “consensus” Komter (1989)
documented—one in which both men and women endorsed male primacy
and believed it is natural for women to enjoy housework and men to pur-
sue professional ambition—may be outdated given attitudinal changes
among this group (Daminger 2020; Knight and Brinton 2017; Scarborough,
Sin, and Risman 2019). Recent research documents how such couples
navigate (un)employment (e.g., Damaske 2021; Rao 2020) and domestic
labor (e.g., Daminger 2020). However, this scholarship pays limited atten-
tion to power and does not elucidate the ideological consensus under
pinning partners’ prioritization of men’s paid work and acceptance of
women’s disproportionate unpaid labor burden. We seek to identify the
Wong and Daminger / THE MYTH OF MUTUALITY 159
new consensus underpinning gendered power imbalances among this

group of couples, the strategies they draw upon to manage their power
dynamic, and the effectiveness of those strategies.
We draw on 112 interviews with members of 44 highly educated, dif-
ferent-gender couples to update and extend theorizing on invisible power.
We show that couples’ conviction that they are practicing mutuality serves
as the ideological consensus upholding men’s interests. Adherence to this
updated “family myth” (Hochschild 1989)—that partners are mutually
pursuing both individuals’ and the family’s best interests—directs part-
ners’ attention to their efforts at practicing mutuality. Simultaneously, it
helps couples downplay unsuccessful outcomes of those efforts. Progress
toward gender equality among different-gender couples will likely remain
stalled as long as the gap between couples’ mutualistic intentions and
gendered behaviors remains obscured (England 2010).
Revisiting Theories Of Marital Power
Building on Lukes’ and Gramsci’s work, Komter’s (1989, 192) study

of marital power identified three ways one spouse may “affect consciously
or unconsciously the emotions, attitudes, cognitions, or behavior” of the
other. Manifest power operates when one spouse desires change and the
other thwarts that desire. In the housework context, manifest power may
look like men’s explicit refusal to complete household chores (Miller and
Carlson 2016). In the career space, it is visible when husbands expressly
oppose women’s job searches (Damaske 2021; Rao 2020). Latent power
operates without visible conflict, when the less-powerful partner antici-
pates opposition and avoids raising an issue: For instance, men hold out
long enough that women stop requesting their housework contributions
(Lamont 2020), or working women stop asking their unemployed hus-
bands to do more housework (Damaske 2021; Rao 2020). Resignation and
resentment are key indicators of latent power.
Finally, invisible power is the ability to resist change because of an
unspoken agreement that a power-imbalanced situation is inevitable.
Invisible power is difficult to detect because it involves neither conflict
nor latent grievance. Instead, Komter (1989, 192) identifies “systematic
gender differences in mutual and self-esteem [and] differences in percep-
tions of, and legitimations concerning, everyday reality.” In Komter’s
data, this meant tacit consensus that men’s interests are general interests
and that a status quo built on male breadwinning and female homemaking
is natural. Invisible power operates when couples agree that women

“naturally” enjoy and excel at housework (Lamont 2020) or that men’s job
searches are paramount (Damaske 2021; Rao 2020).
All three forms of power are gendered, work to men’s advantage
(Komter 1989), and continue to shape contemporary couples’ interactions
(Lamont 2020; Miller and Carlson 2016; Rao 2020). Yet changes in
romantic partnership ideals suggest an increasingly important role for
invisible power. Exercising manifest power to dominate a partner is
inconsistent with expectations for spouses to be mutually supportive in
employment and domestic activities (Cherlin 2004; Lamont 2020).
Exercising latent power to prevent one’s partner from speaking up under-
mines desires for open communication and sharing in all aspects of life
(Gerson 2011; Lamont 2020).
Therefore, invisible power likely contributes to gendered power imbal-
ances that persist across the career (Becker and Moen 1999; Wong 2023)
and domestic spheres (Killewald and Gough 2010; Perry-Jenkins and
Gerstel 2020). Invisible power may explain why women in different-
gender relationships typically complete more unpaid labor, particularly
the least flexible tasks (Perry-Jenkins and Gerstel 2020), and why con-
flicting professional and family responsibilities more often lead women to
scale back their career ambitions (Stone and Lovejoy 2004), whereas
men’s paid work is treated as a fixed point around which women adjust
(Killewald and García-Manglano 2016).
However, the ideological “consensus” around male breadwinning and
female homemaking that Komter documented in the 1980s may be out-
dated. Support for women’s achievement in market work has grown
(Knight and Brinton 2017; Scarborough, Sin, and Risman 2019), as has
openness to men’s participation at home (Dernberger and Pepin 2020),
although essentialist attitudes regarding women’s family responsibilities
appear more persistent (Pepin and Cotter 2018). Recent studies of unem-
ployment (Damaske 2021; Rao 2020) and domestic labor (Daminger
2020) suggest that couples rarely enact these stated beliefs. Yet this schol-
arship does not directly name the ideological consensus driving partners’
agreement to prioritize men’s job searches and accept women’s greater
housework and childcare burden. For example, Rao (2020) finds that
families rally to help men but not women meet the “ideal job seeker
norm,” and Daminger (2020) reveals that partners “de-gender” the alloca-
tion processes that assign more household labor to women. Still, neither
explicitly identifies the ideological consensus shaping these couples’
behaviors. Without centering interpersonal power dynamics in their
analyses, theories regarding how gender inequality works in different-

gender couples remain incomplete.
Given such complex views about gender and power in careers and fam-
ily, along with persistently gender-unequal outcomes in these domains, we
ask: What is the new consensus upholding gendered power imbalances
among contemporary, highly educated couples? What tactics do they use
to manage their power dynamic, consciously or not, and how effective are
those practices at achieving their aims?
Decision-Making, Power, And Labor
To answer these questions, we build on scholarship inferring power

dynamics from decision-making patterns. As early as 1960, Blood and
Wolfe assessed relative power via contested decision outcomes. If Partner
A prefers to relocate and Partner B prefers to remain in place, Partner A is
more powerful if the couple ultimately moves. Although no single deci-
sion can stand in for the couple’s overall power dynamic, the aggregation
of multiple decisions may be a good proxy. Blood and Wolfe (1960)
weighed individual decisions equally, but later studies accounted for dif-
ferences in decision significance (Gillespie 1971), recognizing that the
final say on whether one relocates for work is likely more impactful than
the final say on the weekly meal plan. Scholars also pivoted from empha-
sizing decision outcomes to examining decision processes (Hill and
Scanzoni 1982), as the how of decision-making (i.e., the process by which
couples reach resolution) is as or more important than the what (i.e., the
resolution itself).
Our examination of invisible power in couples’ decision-making
expands on these innovations in three ways. First, we investigate
consensus-driven decision-making, where neither “winner” nor “loser”
is apparent. Although disagreement is a hallmark of manifest power, and
resignation a feature of latent power, neither characterizes invisible
power. In our samples, joint decision-making with the goal of attending
to both partners’ interests prevails, suggesting episodes of collaboration
may be as relevant for power as episodes of conflict.
Second, we consider the labor inherent in bringing an issue to and
through the decision stage. Feminist scholars recognize that invisible
labor makes other forms of production possible (DeVault 1991; Papanek
1979). Less-powerful groups, such as women, are disproportionately
burdened with doing this devalued, uncompensated work, while more
powerful groups disproportionately benefit (Pupo and Duffy 2012). We

consider decision-making a subtype of invisible work requiring mental
effort (Daminger 2019) that may accrue benefits to others besides the
laborer. Along with the physical work of driving a child to school, for
example, there is the cognitive work of deciding which school the child
should attend. Mothers may do the work of researching and visiting
schools but share the benefits of this work with children—and with
fathers, who can claim to be sending their child to a good school
(Brown 2022).
Understanding decision-making as labor that can serve others’ inter-
ests complicates the assumption that decision-making authority trans-
lates into more power for the decider (e.g., Kranichfeld 1987). Instead,
decision-making is better understood as a complex mix of labor “inputs”
and power “outputs.” At one extreme, having the final say without doing
the work required to bring an issue to and through the decision stage
would suggest maximal power. At the other, performing decision-related
cognitive labor such as researching options but ceding the final decision
to a partner would suggest minimal power.1 Framing decision-making as
labor extends Daminger’s (2020) framework of de-gendered processes/
gendered outcomes by recognizing processes as work and outcomes as
benefits, thereby tying it to theories of invisible marital power.
Finally, we contextualize couples’ decisions by focusing on interactions
and sequences over time and across spheres. Geist and Ruppanner’s
(2018, 254) “relationship capital” theory recognizes that “currency devel-
oped (or lost) in previous conflicts” shapes the power balances partners
bring to later negotiations. Partners accrue credit for supporting a spouse
in one decision they can use to get their way in the next. We extend the
notion of relationship capital by documenting how it is generated and
spent across the domains of work and family, in addition to over time.
Although Geist and Ruppanner write about housework, the pattern of
dual-career partners taking turns in the “lead” career role (Becker and
Moen 1999) suggests that couples apply this logic to employment, too.
Furthermore, we take decision beneficiaries into account, asking how
men and women “spend” their capital on their own versus children’s or
the family’s interests. Prior research associates women with greater altru-
ism, particularly vis-à-vis children. England (1989) theorizes female-
typed selves as more connective than separative, apt to prioritize emotional
ties and weigh others’ utility the same as one’s own. Others document a
maternal tendency toward self-sacrifice and attunement to children’s
needs (Damaske 2011; Ruddick 1995). Comparing the power dynamics of
parents and nonparents allows us to assess the continued relevance of

these characterizations.
We use this expanded framework for studying marital power to iden-
tify the consensus upholding gendered power imbalances among highly
educated contemporary couples. In investigating areas of agreement,
paying close attention to decision-making labor and considering whose
interests are served in a range of work and family decisions over time,
we document couples’ efforts to manage their power dynamic and evalu-
ate their effectiveness. Our findings offer important insights for long-
standing questions about the persistence of gender inequalities despite
changing ideology and the nature of decision-making and invisible
power dynamics within cooperative groups.
Data And Methods
We analyze 112 interviews from two studies of different-gender cou-

ples’ decision-making. These complementary data sets give us a broad
view of couples’ dynamics across domains. One study emphasizes high-
level career decisions affecting the broad circumstances of partners’ lives;
the other emphasizes everyday decisions about housework and childcare
shaping couples’ routine experiences. The combined data set lets us exam-
ine socially valued (career) and socially devalued (domestic) decision
areas within the same framework (Pupo and Duffy 2012; Sarti, Bellavitis,
and Martini 2018). Although couples’ decisions about paid and unpaid
labor are regularly studied, simultaneous examination of both domains in
such detail is less common.
Career Decisions Study

One data set, the Career Decisions Study (CDS), comes from a larger
study of how young, different-gender couples make career decisions. We
primarily analyze 48 in-depth interviews collected from 24 partners of 12
highly educated couples (one baseline and follow-up interview per per-
son) who were married (10 couples) or engaged (two couples) and child-
free at baseline. Although the larger study included unmarried couples, we
excluded them to hold marital status constant across the data sets. One or
both partners were conducting a national job search or applying broadly
for further education. The extreme case of deciding whether to move for
career opportunities emphasizes high-stakes decision-making dynamics,
as the opportunity costs of being a trailing spouse were particularly high

for these young professionals. However, “smaller” career decisions such
as taking a promotion with more responsibilities likely involve related
dynamics. Baseline and follow-up interviews captured decision-making
as it unfolded over time. We reference an additional 48 interviews (two
follow-up interviews per person collected 1 and 5 years from baseline) for
data on decision outcomes and consequences.
Couples were recruited through graduate and professional school email
lists at several elite private and large public universities in a Midwestern
metropolitan area. Theoretical sampling ensured even representation of
couples across primary job seeker gender (her, his, or both partners’ career
opportunity) and professional field(s). The mean age in CDS was 28 years
(range: 23–35), and 71 percent identified as white. Average relationship
duration was just over 6 years (range: 1.5–15), with the average length of
marriage, if applicable, 2.5 years (range: 0.5–10). Table 1 summarizes
CDS participants’ characteristics. Notably, partners were similar in educa-
tional attainment and professional field, enabling an especially clear view
into how gender shapes power dynamics.
Baseline interviews collected January to April 2013 captured couples’
initial job search approaches, including how job seekers involved their
partners. Partners were interviewed separately within a week and asked
not to share study details with each other. Follow-up interviews con-
ducted approximately 4 months later (April–August 2013) assessed how
couples reached final decisions following receipt of school or job offers
(or lack thereof). Most interviews were conducted in person in the
researcher’s office, cafes, or participants’ workplaces or homes; three
were conducted via phone. Both baseline and follow-up interviews aver-
aged 1 hour. Additional follow-up interviews were conducted by phone
8 to 12 months after baseline (August 2013–August 2014; average 35
minutes), and over Zoom 5 years later (November 2018–June 2019;
average 2–3 hours).
Housework Decisions Study

The second data set, the Housework Decisions Study (HDS), comes
from a broader study of household labor among members of 32 different-
gender couples (64 interviews). Respondents were married,2 were col-
lege-educated,3 and had at least one child under 5 years. Participants were
recruited primarily via online parenting forums and email lists in a
Northeastern metropolitan area, and secondarily through the researcher’s
Table 1: Career Decisions Study Participants and Time 1 Characteristics
Partners Occupations Primary job seeker
Cristina MPP student Both

Anthony MPP student
Nora STEM PhD student Both
Rick STEM postdoc
Anna STEM postdoc Both
Petera,b STEM PhD student
Katie STEM PhD student Katie (woman)
Will STEM PhD student
Ashley STEM PhD student Ashley (woman)
Jake Entrepreneur (BA)
Janelle Humanities MA student Janelle (woman)
Stephen STEM PhD student
Lauren Social science MA student Lauren (woman)
Thomas JD student
Leslie Social science MA student Leslie (woman)
Andrewb Defense professional (BA)
Joyce Software engineer (BA) Jeff (man)
Jeff STEM PhD student
Emily Editor (PhD) Brad (man)
Brad Social science PhD student
Rebecca Scientist (MS) Joseph (man)
Joseph STEM PhD student
Vanessa Scientist (MS) Alex (man)
Alexa,b STEM postdoc
Note: All couples were married and living together unless marked as engageda or in a long-
distance relationship.b
network and participant referrals. The advertised topic was “how parents
make decisions,” to avoid priming on gender or household labor. Stay-at-
home fathers were oversampled to achieve rough balance in men’s and
women’s employment status.
The average HDS participant was 35.5 years old (range: 28–50).
Couples had been married an average of 6.6 years (range: 1–22). No racial
exclusion criteria were advertised, but 81% of men and 78% of women
identified as white. Most men (78%) and women (66%) worked full-time
for pay in fields including law, medicine, finance, education, and aca-
demia. Employed women worked a median of 40 hours per week and
earned $70,000; employed men worked a median of 46 hours and earned
$107,500. In a substantial minority of couples, the female partner earned
(34%) or worked (41%) as much as or more than her partner. Couples

averaged 1.5 children, and the mean age of the youngest child was 2 years.
Table 2 summarizes HDS participants’ characteristics.
In-person interviews4 conducted in 2017 averaged 1 hour. As with
CDS, partners were interviewed separately and asked not to discuss the
study until both interviews were complete. Prior to each interview,
respondents completed a “decision log” recording all family-related
decisions made and contemplated over a 24-hour period. These logs
structured the beginning of each interview, in which respondents
detailed the circumstances surrounding logged decisions, including any
partner involvement. Then respondents answered broader questions
about their decision-making processes and ideal/actual division of
domestic labor.
Table 2: Housework Decisions Study Participant Demographics
Partners and occupations Relative paid work hours Relative income
Rebecca, Physician She works; he does She earns all

Jonathan, At-home parent not income
Gina, Researcher She works; he does She earns all
Garrett, At-home parent not income
Kelli, Software engineer She works; he does She earns all
Roger, At-home parent not income
Meg, Grants manger She works; he does She earns all
Bram, At-home parent not income
Chelsea, Lawyer She works 4+ hours She earns
Phil, Software engineer more $5K+ more
Natalie, Physician She works 4+ hours He earns
Jay, Finance more $5K+ more
Stephanie, PhD student She works 4+ hours He earns
Carl, Software engineer more $5K+ more
Jenna, Professor She works 4+ hours He earns
Peter, Lawyer more $5K+ more
Holly, Chiropractor She works 4+ hours He earns
Tyler, Chiropractor more $5K+ more
Siobhan, Public policy Equal She earns
Antoni, Manager $5K+ more
Annette, Physician Equal She earns
Craig, Information technology $5K+ more
Kendra, Finance Equal She earns
Troy, Architect $5K+ more
(continued)
Table 2. (continued)
Partners and occupations Relative paid work hours Relative income
Bridget, Project manger Equal He earns

Jimmy, Software engineer $5K+ more
Brittany, Non-profit He works 4+ hours Equal
Don, Non-profit more
Jackie, Dietitian He works 4+ hours She earns
Matthew, PhD student more $5K+ more
Kristen, Public policy He works 4+ hours He earns
Alan, Project manager more $5K+ more
Alexis, Business He works 4+ hours He earns
Todd, Software engineer more $5K+ more
Stacey, Admin. assistant He works 4+ hours He earns
William, Admin. assistant more $5K+ more
Brooke, Teacher He works 4+ hours He earns
Jason, Finance more $5K+ more
Sharon, Non-profit He works 4+ hours He earns
Douglas, Teacher more $5K+ more
Desiree, Teacher He works 4+ hours He earns
Danny, Teacher more $5K+ more
Shaina, Librarian He works 4+ hours He earns
Ben, Researcher more $5K+ more
Heather, Research manager He works 4+ hours He earns
Jeremy, Research manager more $5K+ more
Kara, Consultant He works 4+ hours He earns
Joel, Consultant more $5K+ more
Carla, Designer He works 4+ hours He earns
Robert, Psychiatrist more $5K+ more
Liz, PhD student He works 4+ hours He earns
Nathan, Administrator more $5K+ more
Nina, PhD student He works 4+ hours He earns
Julian, Physician more $5K+ more
Leah, At-home parent He works; she does Equala
Mateo, Researcher not
Lisa, At-home parent He works; she does He earns all
Steve, Information technology not income
Talia, At-home parent He works; she does He earns all
Levi, PhD student not income
Jill, At-home parent He works; she does He earns all
Frank, Consultant not income
Joanna, At-home parent He works; she does He earns all
Isaac, Marketing not income
a. At the time of the interview, Leah was on an extended, partially paid leave from her
employer, and her reduced salary approximately equaled Mateo’s.

Combining and Analyzing the Samples

Both studies included interview questions about the nonfocal domain.
CDS asked how couples’ career decisions impacted choices about family
planning and household routines. HDS asked how daily household deci-
sions interacted with decisions regarding paid work. Our data therefore
allow us to explore whether and how relationship capital is used in deci-
sion-making across domains in couples’ shared lives.
The studies feature distinct samples of couples at slightly different life
stages: childfree couples versus parents of young children. Because we
did not co-develop our interview guides, we could not analyze responses
to identical questions across studies. We acknowledge the resulting limits
but emphasize the value of combining data sets to triangulate findings.
Given the demographic similarity of the two samples, we suspect patterns
seen in each would appear in the other if the nonfocal domain were more
prominent. We present findings consistent across our studies and connect
differences to variations in our research protocols, leveraging them to
explore differences in decision-making across contexts.
The experiences of our privileged interviewees may not generalize
to other populations. However, studying privileged actors allows us to
observe decision-making agency among people who are not “forced” to
make choices out of economic need or safety concerns. Furthermore,
because interviewees self-selected into our studies, our analyses may best
reflect patterns among couples with high relationship quality and open-
ness to egalitarianism. Still, no partners were perfectly aligned with one
another, and our study designs allowed us to directly compare attitudes
with behaviors to analyze gendered power.
To do this, we closely read our respective transcripts and indepen-
dently coded them by interview question or topic (Deterding and Waters
2021). We also wrote summaries of individual interviewees’ responses
to situate them in their broader contexts: The first author compared
respondents’ baseline decision-making approaches with their revised
approaches and outcomes at follow-up; the second author compared
how respondents talked about decision-making in the abstract and how
they described specific, recent decisions. Because couples were the
main unit of analysis, both authors compared partners’ accounts to iden-
tify couple-level dynamics. Last, we considered how decision-making in
focal and nonfocal domains differed. Each author compiled this infor-
mation in analytic memos that guided discussions of emerging findings.
We discussed differences between data sets to understand how power
relations vary across domains, time scales, and life stages. After meeting,
we independently applied new codes to deductively analyze transcripts
and generate revised memos. We repeated this process until we con-
verged on a unified argument.
For example, each author independently observed that multiple respond-
ents emphasized “working as a team” and prioritizing “the couple” and
described setting aside personal preferences in service of this goal. We
labeled this shared, reciprocal commitment to pursuing both individuals’
and the family unit’s best interests mutuality. In the deductive coding
round, we assessed the prevalence of this theme in the full data set.
Dissonant partner views alerted us to contradictory cases, which we con-
nected to decision domains or other couple characteristics. Discussing
dissonant partner interviews also called our attention to how couples fell
short of mutuality and reproduced gender inequality, which became the
next theme we coded and discussed.
Findings
What is the consensus upholding contemporary couples’ invisible

power dynamics? Couples’ conviction that they were mutually sharing
power by emphasizing “us” in all decisions and balancing a decision
portfolio led many to overlook gendered power imbalances that emerged
in their decision-making processes and outcomes. Partners’ focus on their
efforts to practice mutuality rendered resulting power imbalances irrele-
vant and thus invisible.
Mutuality: Pursuing the Collective Good and Sharing

Decision-Making Burdens
Rather than seeing decision-making as an opportunity to accumulate
personal “wins” (i.e., drive a decision outcome to serve personal inter-
ests), 10 of 12 CDS and 24 of 32 HDS couples strongly aspired to mutu-
ality, seeking to advance everyone’s interests. When Brittany (HDS)
advocated for more equitable exercise opportunities following their
daughter’s birth, her husband acquiesced, though that meant reducing
his own workouts. Don explained, “It was important, because [working
out] is a part of our routine that we really enjoy. I don’t think either
one of us wants to resent our partner for [keeping us from] that.”
Similarly, Alex (CDS) restricted his job search to Washington, DC,
where his long-distance fiancée Vanessa targeted her own job hunt,
because unilateral decision-making that primarily benefited his career
would harm their relationship:
I would prefer it not to be me being like, “Hey, I’ve decided to move to San
Francisco. Pack your stuff.” Vanessa enjoys her work a lot so uprooting her
is not going to be good for our relationship or good for her.
For Don and Alex, it was more important to equally weight their own
and their partner’s wishes than to get exactly what they wanted. Exercising
manifest power by telling Vanessa what to do, or latent power by ignoring
Brittany’s request for change, were unpalatable options. Rather than
assuming male primacy, these couples expected mutuality.
Respondents’ desire for mutuality extended beyond equally weighing
each person’s interests: Decision-making labor, they argued, should also be
equally distributed. Although scholars often equate decision-making author-
ity with individual power (e.g., Kranichfeld 1987), respondents like Liz
(HDS) sometimes found independent decision-making “exhausting” rather
than empowering. In turn, Liz experienced her husband Nathan’s involve-
ment as a relief rather than an intrusion on her authority: “I like making him
make—not making him, but getting his input or making sure that he’s
involved in the decision making. Because it feels exhausting to make all the
decisions.” When Nathan decided the family dinner plan, for example, Liz
felt that “whatever you put in front of me I will eat gladly and appreciate
that you took the mental burden, the actual logistical burden, away.”
Likewise, Nora (CDS) considered her husband’s involvement in her
career decisions a helpful check on her tendency to perseverate rather than
an unwelcome constraint on her autonomy. Nora and Rick were both pur-
suing academic jobs. Because Rick sought a permanent faculty position
whereas Nora sought a short-term fellowship, the couple decided Nora
would apply in cities where Rick was a candidate for a tenure-track job.
Nora welcomed this restriction:
The postdoc [application] process would seem really overwhelming [oth-

erwise] because I could literally go anywhere . . . Being an indecisive
person that tends to be a worrier, being able to go anywhere would be
completely overwhelming . . . I would constantly be wanting to delay mak-
ing that decision.
Respondents saw the mental work of decision-making as a cost and

were grateful to share that burden with their partner. Nathan’s participation
in meal planning and Rick’s encouragement of Nora’s fellowship applica-

tions bucked assumptions of men’s singular focus on paid work and
women’s “natural” place at home and instead suggested that partners
aspired to mutual support in both domains.
Although no one expressed overtly selfish5 approaches to decision-
making, partners varied in their commitment to advancing everyone’s
interests and equally distributing decision-making labor. One CDS and
five HDS women feared that if they did not proactively assert themselves,
their interests would be overrun. Desiree (HDS) worried about how she
and her husband Danny would divide housework after the end of her
parental leave and his summer vacation from teaching:
I really don’t want to start fighting about this kind of stuff. I’ve brought it
up a couple times. I’m like, “We should really start designating jobs so that
each person can do what they’re supposed to do. Then I don’t feel like I
have to ask you to do things, or remind you, you just know.”
By assigning laundry to herself and cooking to Danny, Desiree hoped

to avoid becoming overburdened. Danny had so far resisted her sugges-
tion, suggesting latent power was at play. He acknowledged transition-
ing back to work would present challenges (“When I go back to school,
it will be hard. It’s a new class, in a new school, so I can’t take too much
time off”) but seemed confident their existing practice of informally
allocating housework would hold: “For me [assigning chores] is, who-
ever has time to do it, I’m fine with . . . .I don’t think about [an ideal
allocation].”
Others (one CDS man and members of four HDS couples) seemed to
disrespect, though not fully dismiss, their partner’s interests and/or feel
disrespected by their partner. Resentment tinged Garrett’s (HDS) descrip-
tion of how he and wife Gina made financial decisions together:
We don’t. My family’s money has been supporting us for the last five years,
and when she was really busy in the first half of grad school, she was too
busy to even do anything other than grad school so I managed everything .
. . Ostensibly, she has been pursuing her career.
Garrett’s tone and phrasing (“ostensibly”; “I managed everything”)

implied some combination of contempt for Gina and frustration at her
perceived selfishness. Gina, meanwhile, had frustrations of her own.
When it came to managing household logistics, she felt Garrett was insuf-
ficiently collaborative: “He is a very introverted person, and he does not
like to be in charge. Sometimes that can cause some tension, where I’m
like, ‘Someone else make a frigging decision!’” The spouses’ palpable
dissatisfaction suggested both recognized a gap between a mutualistic
ideal and their own relationship.
Exceptions aside, mutuality was central to most couples’ performance
of intimacy. Even if joint decision-making was inefficient, building con-
sensus around mutuality allowed partners to reaffirm their bond. Isaac
(HDS) and his wife consulted each other on most issues, perhaps even
“more than we need to,” because “it’s nice to decide things with your
partner. It’s nice to have your life together, and so forth.” Respondents felt
similarly about joint career decision-making. Explaining why he would
turn down an ideal job offer, Rick (CDS; husband of postdoctoral candi-
date Nora, introduced above) said:
Any decision I make in the long run is a couple decision. It’s a proxy for
how much I care about Nora. I mean, I really care about her. If you tell
somebody “I am moving there, you can follow me,” it’s because you don’t
give anything about it.
Rick’s commitment to Nora and their marriage led him to turn down
offers that would be bad for her academic career and to negotiate job
opportunities on her behalf.
Couples’ commitment to mutuality extended beyond platitudes. Partners
described two tactics they mixed and matched in hopes of achieving “our
way”: emphasizing “us” and balancing a decision portfolio. By deliber-
ately and explicitly allocating labor and benefits equally across partners,
couples could theoretically balance each person’s power. We detail these
tactics before discussing how invisible power imbalances nevertheless
crept in.
Couples’ first resort was to emphasize “us” by subsuming individual
perspectives within a single vision. They framed this as different from
compromise, which implies two distinct positions that must be reconciled.
Rather, emphasizing “us” ideally meant co-generating a joint position. For
occasional, major decisions like moving or changing careers, partners
generated consensus via formal planning. Joyce said she and Jeff (CDS)
used this method to map out how their lives would look if Jeff pursued
two different career paths:
We did our usual thing, which was, we both went off and thought about it
and wrote everything down—we did this with several life decisions before,
where we meet for two or three hours and . . . .we diagrammed out what
we thought was good for the short term, what we thought was good for the
longer term, what our reasoning was, and then an open debate.
Joyce was pleased their session revealed that “We want things that
involve settling down.” Jeff agreed: “If we’re not moving out of [our cur-
rent city], we can get a house, we can think about having kids, we can
consider the dog, we can . . . .move on to the next phase of life.” With
this joint vision in mind, the partners agreed Jeff would only consider
jobs in their current city. From this point forward, there was no more talk
of Jeff’s perspective or Joyce’s; rather, they focused on how to execute
their shared vision.
Because formal planning to emphasize “us” took so much deliberate
work, couples more commonly engaged in ongoing conversation that
blurred the boundaries between partners’ individual viewpoints and con-
tributions. Jeremy (HDS) half-jokingly referred to himself and his wife
as “the parenting committee.” “We’re constantly consulting,” he said,
even regarding low-stakes issues like what to do with a child on a week-
end morning. “I don’t know if necessarily it’s indecision or if it’s sort of
an insecurity with the decisions,” he mused. “Sort of wanting to make
sure that, ‘Hey, is this the right thing to do, what do you think about
this?’ Sending it to the parenting committee rather than you just acting
unilaterally.”
Jake and Ashley (CDS) used constant communication to consider
options for Ashley’s career. “We’re big into discussing things,” said Jake:
We’re very communicative, open about talking about issues and what we
want to do, and we’re very supportive. We talk a lot about this, like, “What
are we going to do, how is this going to work?”. . . . Ashley will talk about,
like, “I think we should move to [a country abroad].” She talks about this a
lot. And it’s almost not a joke anymore, it’s almost a thing where I’m like,
“You know what, sure, let’s consider that.”
Ashley concurred that “we just kind of talk all the time about
. . . .‘What do we want to be doing? What kind of jobs?’” to brainstorm
a solution for “us” rather than stake out opposing claims for two “me’s.”
Constant communication turned a possibly contentious negotiation into an
open-ended discussion.
When emphasizing “us” was impractical, or impossible because
partners had opposing interests, couples turned to an additional tactic:
balancing their decision portfolio. They sought to ensure partners had
similar levels of decision-making responsibility and roughly equivalent
opportunities to “win” across the broad landscape of their life together.

Sometimes “balance” meant each partner led decision-making in dis-
tinct arenas. For any given decision area, one partner was implicitly or
explicitly designated primary decision maker and the other second-
ary—but, importantly, these roles were reversed elsewhere. Lisa (HDS)
described a clear delineation between her own and her husband’s areas
of authority:
Financial decisions, Steve will often say to me, “Hey, do you want to learn
about this and such, or do you want me to explain what’s going on with
this?” [I’ll say,] “No, no, I haven’t got the mental space for that, you just
figure it out, and I trust you to do that which needs to be done.”
While Lisa happily deferred to Steve on finances, both partners agreed

she led travel and social planning.
Similarly, partners could pursue balance by dividing a multifaceted
decision into subissues, with each partner taking the lead on some. When
Rebecca (CDS) agreed to quit her job so Joseph could pursue career
opportunities in other regions, Joseph made sure the couple moved to a
location Rebecca preferred:
I know location’s important to her. . . .there’s been jobs I haven’t applied

for because of the location. . . . .I think Florida would be her first
choice.. . . . If it was just me, I would probably look more towards
Pennsylvania. . . .but there’s two people, and [I’m] worrying about what
Rebecca wants, too.
To balance out his career “win” and Rebecca’s career “loss,” Joseph
accepted “losing” some locations so Rebecca could “win” by picking
where the couple lived.
Other times, balance was interpreted longitudinally, such that both
partners would have equal opportunity to win in the same domain over
time. Andrew and Leslie (CDS) followed this approach to manage two
demanding careers. When Andrew accepted a 5-year contract requiring
frequent travel and periodic relocation—conditions that made it hard
for Leslie to work continuously or pursue her PhD in one place—he
explained, “The next five years, at least, are going to be for her. I mean,
she’s followed me around through everything. I think I owe her every-
thing.” In 5 years, he vowed, Leslie would dictate their location, even
if Andrew had to turn down other opportunities to move for her. Such
explicit efforts at sharing power underscore couples’ joint commitment
to mutuality and rejection of a consensus built on male primacy

(Komter 1989).
Falling Short: The Persistence of Gender Inequality

Couples’ power-equalizing tactics were not foolproof. All but five cou-
ples in each study reproduced gender inequality via a gender-traditional
division of household labor and/or prioritization of men’s careers. We
identify several nonexclusive mechanisms by which such inequalities
could emerge but remain invisible. In short, couples insisted they were
successfully practicing mutuality without accurately tracking whose inter-
ests were served and whose labor promoted those interests, suggesting
that an uninterrogated belief in the mutuality myth constitutes the updated
consensus upholding men’s invisible power (Komter 1989).
In CDS, couples fell short when emphasizing “us” looked more like
emphasizing “him”: They made decisions that better served men’s inter-
ests, even as partners argued that both spouses’ interests were served.
Cristina declined her first-choice job offer with a local policy group in
Chicago when she sensed her partner Anthony would rather enroll in a
graduate program in Washington, DC, than accept a Chicago-based pro-
gram’s offer. Although the couple only considered locations that broadly
worked for both partners’ careers, Cristina gave up her dream job in city-
level policy making to move to DC without a job offer. Anthony would
only have given up a slightly better-ranked PhD program by accepting the
Chicago offer.
Still, Cristina, who previously worked in international policy but
returned to school to transition into local policy, insisted she could better
pursue her former field in Washington, DC:
I think this is the right decision. I kind of feel sad because coming [to meet
you] today, I have nothing. I don’t even have an interview in DC. But I am
very, very comfortable that this is the right decision. I think that is going to
open more doors, to have the DC network and all the international organi-
zations.. . . . Yes, both in Anthony’s life and also in mine.
Anthony agreed this decision would benefit both partners: “The priority
for us as a couple right now is for me to get the best possible outcome
from the PhD . . . It should be something that will be valuable for us in the
future.” Anthony did not force Cristina to decline her offer (manifest
power). Neither did Cristina grudgingly anticipate Anthony’s resistance to
her career pursuits (latent power). Instead, both accepted this as the right
decision because they believed it accomplished their shared goal of mutu-

ality (invisible power). By glossing over the discrepancy in how much this
decision benefited each person’s interests—Anthony entered his first-
choice program while Cristina became unemployed—couples like Cristina
and Anthony could believe they were emphasizing “us” while in fact
emphasizing him.
Gendered power imbalances also emerged in CDS when couples’
attempts to balance career decisions over time were thwarted by failure to
anticipate how his early decision wins might foreclose her later wins.
Brad and Emily agreed Brad should apply widely for data scientist jobs
first so Emily could then target her applications wherever Brad accepted
an offer. After relocating, the partners were surprised that the types of
museums Emily trained to work in did not exist in their new region. Brad
vowed to help Emily return to her career (“She could pick up freelanc-
ing.. . . .I’ve talked to some people at work about her [research]”), but
follow-up interviews revealed that after 5 years of informal consulting and
lead parenting, Emily had yet to find the full-time work she hoped for.
Nevertheless, she emphasized Brad’s commitment to her professional
pursuits: “Brad’s still working at [high-paying company] so fortunately
we can afford for me to. . . .get a babysitter four days a week or so in the
mornings. . . .and I either edit or write.” Emily concluded, “We’re a good
team. I’ve always felt like we were on the same team.” Emily’s focus on
the mutuality myth—“we’re a good team”—obscured the couple’s career
imbalance.
Finally, CDS couples sometimes fell short of practicing mutuality in
expending decision-making labor. As her husband Joseph’s “job search
coordinator,” Rebecca invested mental energy to support his career:
I’m just sort of compiling all the jobs together to look at.. . . . Me having a
job and not being in school, it kind of frees up my stress level.. . . . When
you’re in school and doing research [like Joseph is], it’s just like, it never
ends. . . .but I go home and can not worry about [my job], so it’s not stress-
ful at all for me to do extra work in that sense.
Given Joseph’s school and work responsibilities, Rebecca volunteered

to share the cognitive work of job hunting. In contrast, after the couple
eventually moved for his position, Joseph downplayed the urgency of
Rebecca’s job search: “In our [financial] situation it wouldn’t be neces-
sary.” He provided minimal instrumental and emotional support, to
Rebecca’s frustration:
I don’t feel that we talk enough or talk about certain things that I need to
talk about. Just in this process of job searching—like, I tend to not under-
stand things I feel unless I talk about them.. . . . So, I tried to communicate
that to Joseph. If nobody asks me how I feel about certain things, I’ll never
explore it myself fully.
This dynamic corroborates previous empirical findings (Damaske

2021; Rao 2020). Extending the broader theoretical conversation about
invisible marital power, we posit that Joseph’s failure to invest cognitive
labor into Rebecca’s job search resulted in a gendered power imbalance in
which both partners worked together to promote Joseph’s interests, but
Rebecca labored alone to advance hers. Still, Rebecca considered Joseph
to be committed to mutuality because he was financially “supporting me
for no reason, really” during her unemployment.
Imbalances in men’s and women’s expenditure of cognitive labor also
appeared in HDS, where couples’ household decisions were influenced
by the presence of children. Mothers and fathers alike were committed
to serving their children’s interests, and most described making parent-
ing decisions together. Kara said she and husband Joel “never make
[child-related] decisions unilaterally.” Danny, father to a newborn, said,
“We aren’t good at making [unilateral] decisions, but also the baby is so
young and new that we want to make sure that everything is, we are
agreeing with it.”
But alongside this commitment to mutually advancing children’s inter-
ests was an assumption that women were better attuned to those interests,
which translated into women’s greater parenting decision contributions.
Douglas explained of wife Sharon, “She just is thinking about [our baby]
and just all of his needs more than I am. Just for the fact that she is who
she is, and the fact that she is his mom.” Sharon concurred: “I think it is
maybe a function of being a nursing mom, or just a mom in general, where
you tend to be very aware of all the things going on with the body of this
little person.” Consequently, women like Sharon overwhelmingly tracked
infants’ changing nutritional needs and suggested opportune moments to
introduce new foods. They initiated childcare discussions and came up
with a shortlist of daycares or nannies. They monitored health concerns
and raised an alarm when it was time to seek medical attention.
HDS couples acknowledged women’s cognitive burden and sought to
balance decision-making labor by including men in parenting decisions.
Yet these attempts fell short when men’s involvement meant rubber-stamp-
ing women’s work. Kara, who avowed her commitment to joint parenting
decisions, was pleased that “Joel likes to be involved and give his opinion
on things.” Yet she noted that when she raises issues with Joel, she often
“[has] a feeling he’d be like, ‘That’s fine.’” Recently, she shared her plans
for their son’s birthday party: “I wanted to make sure that we talked about
it. So it was, ‘Okay, great. I think we should get bagels.’ [He said,] ‘Great!
Bagel sounds good.’” The couple’s commitment to mutuality made Joel’s
agreement important, even if it took the form of a rubber stamp on Kara’s
carefully considered recommendation. Their disproportionate focus on the
most visible part of the cognitive labor process (decision-making; Daminger
2019) enabled them to overlook labor imbalances elsewhere.
Similarly, HDS couples fell short of equally distributing decision-
making labor when men’s involvement took the form of wielding veto
power or selectively participating in matters they felt passionate about. As
Alan said regarding parenting decisions, “If I have issue with something,
we’ll talk about it.” He could challenge his wife Kristen’s recommenda-
tions without the obligation to come up with his own. In practice, how-
ever, Alan typically agreed with Kristen’s parenting decisions because he
assumed she had their son’s interests in mind: “I just trust that she’s got it.
There’s a lot of trust there, I think. At least from my perspective . . . She’s
a great mom.” Alan rarely reviewed Kristen’s decisions because “she’s got
it.” On other domestic issues, Kristen described Alan as:
the big-picture guy.. . . . He gets really excited about something, any-

thing—it could be a trip, it could be whatever—and wants to do it. And then
I’m the wet blanket that says, “Okay, how do we get there and what do we
have to do first?”
After planting an idea he believed would benefit “us,” Alan often left
the planning—and related labor—to Kristen. Alan’s active participation in
shaping household life, coupled with the partners’ inattention to dispari-
ties in the effort involved in executing their shared vision, bolstered the
couple’s sense of themselves as a team.
These patterns are not explained by differences in work hours and earn-
ings. HDS men partnered with unemployed women leaned into the idea of
domestic decision-making labor as her purview. Isaac noted with some
frustration his wife Joanna’s habit of calling him at work to solicit input
on childcare decisions:
She might ask me, “Should I try to put [the baby] down for a nap now? Or
should we just go out?” “Well, I’m not there. I can’t see the baby. I have no
idea. . . .You just have to make this decision.”
Meanwhile, women partnered with unemployed men felt compelled to

provide support from afar, hinting at a subtly different understanding of
how to enact their commitment to mutuality. Meg noted, with empathy
rather than frustration, that husband Bram “involves” her in decisions
such as what to buy while he is out shopping:
Sometimes there are so many choices that you finally whittle them down,
and you’re like, “I don’t know, I’ve had enough of this.” And the other
person can come in and say, “To me I would prioritize this over that.”
Meg looked for proactive ways to contribute to the couple’s mutuality

project when not physically present, whereas Isaac felt that his physical
distance let him off the hook.
Last, HDS couples fell short when they counted partners’ nonequiva-
lent decision wins as “balanced.” Although couples rarely recognized the
unequal labor costs of home-centered decisions, they were not oblivious
to women’s default authority on domestic matters. To “balance” women’s
domestic leadership, men often retained precedence in the career domain.
Couples implied this was a fair trade. But while day-to-day details of the
household might be driven by women, many couples lived within a
broader landscape dictated by men’s career interests. Nathan offered a
metaphor for his dynamic with wife Liz regarding child-related decisions:
I’m the sort of CEO of the household . . . But here’s the kicker: she’s
the chairman of the board and owns 51% of the company. So she—this
is her thing, and I’ll kind of come up with some fun ideas and be party
planner and support and do all that stuff . . . It’s our company, but she’s
the chairman.
Later, Nathan said the situation was reversed for their careers and
“global” issues such as whether and where to move:
[In] our career right now, it’s not balanced . . . And I’m more particular of
what kind of house we buy, where we live, stuff like that . . . It’s sort of the
global, the local. I care a lot about the global, and she focuses on the local,
and then we reverse sometimes . . . I’m supporting her vision when she
wants to set vision, and she’s supporting my vision when I want to set
vision. But we don’t typically have competing visions.
For her part, Liz said Nathan “doesn’t always notice” details related
to their shared domestic life. “There have been times where I’ve felt
resentful,” she admitted. “Like, ‘Why do I have to keep track of X?’

But. . . . I feel like we’ve found a good balance that feels really good to
me.” Nathan and Liz pointed to their respective leadership roles as evi-
dence of a balanced decision portfolio and commitment to mutuality.
Nathan traded the relationship capital (Geist and Ruppanner 2018)
earned through supporting Liz’s domestic vision for Liz’s support of his
“global” and career vision. Yet their solution to the problem of sharing
power reified the longstanding gendering of public and private spheres.
Men’s greater concentration of career-related wins was frequently juxta-
posed with women’s domestic shot-calling, but in a capitalist society,
the “winner” in the work domain accrues greater prestige and resources
that afford them more power beyond a particular relationship (England
and Kilbourne 1990).
The five CDS and five HDS couples who were more successful at
equalizing marital power (or tipped it in women’s favor) were dispropor-
tionately likely to emphasize “us” via formal planning (like CDS couple
Jeff and Joyce). Men in these couples also conscientiously reciprocated or
exceeded their partners’ cognitive labor investments in career and family
decisions (like Rick in CDS, who negotiated job opportunities for Nora).
Further analysis is beyond the scope of this article, but these tactics may
have helped equalize power outputs and labor inputs across partners.
Discussion And Conclusion
Gender inequalities in the allocation of material and symbolic resources

persist despite changing ideologies and growing desire, particularly
among highly educated individuals, to minimize overtly antagonistic
marital decision-making (Gerson 2011; Lamont 2020; Scarborough, Sin,
and Risman 2019). This apparent contradiction prompts questions about
what upholds gendered power imbalances, given support for women’s
labor market pursuits (Scarborough, Sin, and Risman 2019) and openness
to men’s engagement at home (Dernberger and Pepin 2020). We revisit
and update Komter’s (1989) concept of invisible power for the 21st cen-
tury. The “ideological consensus” upholding men’s invisible power in
Komter’s (1989) day was the assumption of male primacy. We found little
direct evidence of this assumption in our data sets. Instead, the dominant
consensus involved a myth of mutuality.
Our analysis of 112 interviews with the partners of 44 couples reveals
how couples who intentionally use multiple tactics to share power can
nevertheless perpetuate men’s advantage. Power imbalances crept in

when CDS couples adopted “his” vision as “ours” and both partners did
cognitive labor to advance his career interests. Power imbalances emerged
in HDS when “her” vision was adopted as “ours” but women invested
more decision-making labor to advance the interests of children and the
family. Temporal balance proved troublesome in CDS, and balance across
work and family domains reinforced gendered separate spheres in HDS.
Yet couples rarely tracked these inequalities, allowing them to claim they
were “working together” to get “our way.”
The presumption of mutuality helped obscure the persistence of power
imbalances in couples’ decision-making. The mutuality myth adds to our
understanding of couples’ mobilization in support of men’s job searches
(Damaske 2021; Rao 2020) and acceptance of women’s disproportionate
domestic labor burden (Daminger 2020). Seeing themselves as emphasiz-
ing “us” and balancing a decision portfolio across work and home to
benefit the family unit helped couples overlook evidence they subtly
emphasized “his” preferences and relied disproportionately on “her” cog-
nitive labor. Invisible power operates in contemporary different-gender
couples when adherence to this new “family myth” (Hochschild 1989)—
which couples connect to intimacy and coupledom—points partners
toward appreciating deliberate efforts at mutuality while de-emphasizing
critical evaluation of their success. Although most couples fell short of
equalizing marital power, a greater proportion of CDS couples than HDS
couples successfully practiced mutuality, corroborating previous findings
that egalitarian employment attitudes outpace those in the domestic
sphere (Pepin and Cotter 2018).
We suspect that couples’ reliance on constant communication contrib-
utes to the adoption of “his” goal as “our” goal. Whereas formal negotia-
tion facilitates accurate tracking of decision benefits and labor, constant
communication blurs individuals’ viewpoints and contributions, conse-
quently obscuring each person’s decision labor and benefits. In business
negotiations, outcomes are often commodifiable. In marital negotiations,
by contrast, quantitative comparison of individual effort and benefits is
rarely possible or, from partners’ perspectives, desirable. Tracking indi-
vidual wins and losses and the labor involved in achieving these appears
anathema to love and intimacy. Yet the avoidance of scorekeeping creates
its own problems, as individual interests (empirically, men’s) can quietly
overtake the collective good.
Similarly, the fallback approach of balancing an overall decision port-
folio can backfire. Couples were not oblivious to men’s greater career
decision wins. Yet their primary response was to offset his wins with her
wins in the domestic realm, without interrogating the equivalence of such
offsets or factoring in the labor involved. That men’s leadership in the
career space could, in respondents’ view, be balanced by women’s leader-
ship in the domestic space, or by a planned role reversal in the future,
implies couples understood “relationship capital”—credit accrued for
supporting a spouse in one decision that can be leveraged in subsequent
decisions—as common currency portable across time and between work
and home (Becker and Moen 1999; Geist and Ruppanner 2018).
There are at least two problems with this “common currency” inter
pretation. First, partners considered getting one’s way in paid work and
getting one’s way at home as equivalent. In a capitalist society where
status and power are linked to economic resources (England and Kilbourne
1990; Pupo and Duffy 2012), however, domestic- and career-related
“currencies” carry different weights. It is significant that men in our sam-
ple disproportionately won in career decisions, with clear economic
advantages, even as they deferred to their wives on issues related to home
and children—with some notable exceptions regarding “big-ticket” items
like what type of house to buy (Hardill et al. 1997).
Second, couples’ focus on giving each partner equivalent opportunities
to “set vision” did not account for the labor costs of decision-making.
When couples “balanced” men’s career and women’s domestic decision
“wins,” they did not acknowledge the heavy cognitive labor load associ-
ated with driving household decisions (Daminger 2019; Robertson et al.
2019). One notable exception was women partnered with at-home men,
who proactively provided decision support from afar—a behavior rarely
seen in men partnered with at-home women. Career decision-making also
involved considerable cognitive labor. Here, too, women routinely mobi-
lized in service of men’s career goals without reciprocal efforts from men.
Altogether, women’s relationship capital seems not to have as much pur-
chase power as men’s, echoing previous findings that men’s and women’s
financial capital do not carry equivalent weight (Tichenor 2005).
We acknowledge that both our framework and our theoretical conclu-
sions may be most applicable to highly educated, White, different-gender
couples. Our self-selected, privileged samples prevent us from document-
ing the full range of decision-making tactics and power dynamics among
contemporary couples, which may vary for partners with different rela-
tionship satisfaction levels or those sitting at different intersections of
race, class, gender, and sexuality. For example, Moore’s (2008) work on
power among Black lesbian stepfamilies suggests a positive correlation
between power and labor: Biological mothers leverage greater household

labor contributions into family decision-making authority. Although this
finding does not directly contradict our work, which also demonstrates a
complex linkage between labor and authority, it does reveal a need for
further research on the applicability of our findings to couples in other
relational contexts.
Limitations aside, our respondents represent a useful case for examin-
ing gendered power via decision-making, as socially privileged actors
often support egalitarianism and can access resources that facilitate egali-
tarian practices, even if they ultimately behave in gender-unequal ways
(Usdansky 2011). This research adds to literature on gendered power rela-
tions in 21st-century families (e.g., Lamont 2020; Miller and Carlson
2016; Rao 2020) by revealing how endorsing mutuality and developing
strategies for equalizing power are promising but insufficient steps on the
path to equality in different-gender relationships. Further progress will
require careful evaluation of the effectiveness of those strategies and
vigilance regarding common pitfalls, such as the inadvertent substitution
of “his” vision for “ours” or the presumption of balance across incom-
mensurate spheres. Without careful consideration of who gets their way,
how they do so, and the social context surrounding these interactions,
couples and scholars alike may overlook key processes that inscribe and
reinscribe gender inequalities in everyday life.
ORCID iD
Jaclyn S. Wong https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9793-2389
Notes
1. Hardill et al. (1997, 316) distinguish “orchestration” power, the ability to

“make important infrequent decisions which do not infringe on each partner’s
time but which affect the household’s lifestyle,” from “implementation” power,
the ability to make “time-consuming but less important decisions.” Rather than
classify decisions as important or unimportant, we focus on distinctions among
the components of a single decision.
2. One couple was unmarried but cohabited for several years and had a child
together.
3. One respondent completed 3.5 semesters of college but did not receive a
degree.
4. One couple recently relocated and partners were interviewed by phone.

5. This mutualistic perspective was not wholly altruistic. Several respondents
believed they would personally be better served in the long run by prioritizing
mutuality.
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Decision-Making, Marital Power, and

Invisible power—the ability to resist changing one’s behavior because of an unspoken

to minimize power imbalances. Progress toward gender equality among different-gender

Keywords: marital power; household labor; gender inequality; decision-making

P ower relations are fundamental to sociological inquiry on different-

new consensus underpinning gendered power imbalances among this

Revisiting Theories Of Marital Power

Building on Lukes’ and Gramsci’s work, Komter’s (1989, 192) study

is natural. Invisible power operates when couples agree that women

analyses, theories regarding how gender inequality works in different-

Decision-Making, Power, And Labor

To answer these questions, we build on scholarship inferring power

powerful groups disproportionately benefit (Pupo and Duffy 2012). We

parents and nonparents allows us to assess the continued relevance of

Data And Methods

We analyze 112 interviews from two studies of different-gender cou-

Career Decisions Study

as the opportunity costs of being a trailing spouse were particularly high

Housework Decisions Study

Table 1: Career Decisions Study Participants and Time 1 Characteristics

Partners Occupations Primary job seeker

Cristina MPP student Both

(34%) or worked (41%) as much as or more than her partner. Couples

Table 2: Housework Decisions Study Participant Demographics

Partners and occupations Relative paid work hours Relative income

Rebecca, Physician She works; he does She earns all

Partners and occupations Relative paid work hours Relative income

Bridget, Project manger Equal He earns

employer, and her reduced salary approximately equaled Mateo’s.

Combining and Analyzing the Samples

What is the consensus upholding contemporary couples’ invisible

Mutuality: Pursuing the Collective Good and Sharing

The postdoc [application] process would seem really overwhelming [oth-

Respondents saw the mental work of decision-making as a cost and

in meal planning and Rick’s encouragement of Nora’s fellowship applica-

By assigning laundry to herself and cooking to Danny, Desiree hoped

Garrett’s tone and phrasing (“ostensibly”; “I managed everything”)

opportunities to “win” across the broad landscape of their life together.

While Lisa happily deferred to Steve on finances, both partners agreed

I know location’s important to her. . . .there’s been jobs I haven’t applied

to mutuality and rejection of a consensus built on male primacy

Falling Short: The Persistence of Gender Inequality

decision because they believed it accomplished their shared goal of mutu-

Given Joseph’s school and work responsibilities, Rebecca volunteered

This dynamic corroborates previous empirical findings (Damaske

the big-picture guy.. . . . He gets really excited about something, any-

Meanwhile, women partnered with unemployed men felt compelled to

Meg looked for proactive ways to contribute to the couple’s mutuality

resentful,” she admitted. “Like, ‘Why do I have to keep track of X?’

Discussion And Conclusion

Gender inequalities in the allocation of material and symbolic resources

nevertheless perpetuate men’s advantage. Power imbalances crept in

between power and labor: Biological mothers leverage greater household

Jaclyn S. Wong https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9793-2389

1. Hardill et al. (1997, 316) distinguish “orchestration” power, the ability to

4. One couple recently relocated and partners were interviewed by phone.

Jaclyn S. Wong is an assistant professor of sociology at the University

Allison Daminger is an assistant professor of sociology at the University

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