When Colette Murray landed a six-figure job in 1990 as the top fund-raiser for the Henry Ford Health System, her husband, Richard, agreed to be uprooted from his job as Director of Athletic Marketing at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas, to move with her to Detroit.
“It took him all this time to get settled,” Colette Murray, 58, says. He spent a year unemployed before setting up a database management consultant business that’s now thriving.
But they’re getting set to pack up once again.
Colette just accepted a position as chief executive officer of the Sharp Healthcare Foundation in San Diego, Calif., which she’ll start May 22. This move will be easier than the last, the couple says, because they’re both from California, and Richard, 56, has many contacts at the University of San Diego, where he previously worked.
Not every working couple will move as often as the Murrays. But as more women work, a growing number of two-career couples are facing the dilemma of what to do when one gets a promotion, transfer or job offer in another city.
The typical job relocation still involves a married man approximately 35 to 45 years old. But 15 percent of job relocations in 1994 involved working women, up from five percent in 1980, according to the Employee Relocation Council, a Washington-based trade group.
The spouse’s career is just one of many tradeoffs a couple must think about when considering such a move: There also are likely to be changes in living standard, climate, housing, children’s schools and proximity to family members.
“A move is a huge complex of emotions,” says Ilene Chait of Relocation Assistance Inc., a Farmington Hills, Mich.-based placement agency.
Frequently, the partner who is following his or her significant other must make a sacrifice, as Richard Murray did.
A recent study of more than 2,000 couples in the United States, Canada and Europe who relocated for a job showed that dual-career couples were significantly less happy than couples in which only one person worked. Two-career couples experienced more stress and had a more negative view of such a move than one-career couples, according to the study, conducted by the University of Tennessee for a Philadelphia outplacement firm.
Forty-two percent of the 545 dual-income families who responded to the study reported a decrease in their standard of living as a result of a move. More than half of the spouses who found jobs in the new location received less in salary and benefits than in their previous positions.
Madeline Condit, who specializes in recruiting female executives for the search firm Korn/Ferry International, said both men and women are “considering their spouse’s job situation more carefully than they were in the ’80s.”
Not too surprisingly, 80 percent of the trailing partners said they would ask for help in landing a job next time before they would agree to move if their spouse were to find another job.
A growing number of companies are providing that help.
More than half of companies surveyed by the employee relocation council said they offer either formal or informal assistance to spouses of relocating employees, usually by paying the fees of an outside counseling or placement agency. The average payment for such assistance in 1993 was $1,384 per spouse.
Ford Motor Co. helped Jeet and Rama Sanghvi, both engineers in their 20s, who had a job-related odyssey that took them from Nashville to New Orleans to Detroit within six months.
Rama had just finished school at Tennessee State University and had applied for a job at Ford when Jeet was offered a job in New Orleans. She had not heard back from Ford, so he accepted the position in New Orleans and they moved there in November 1993.
Within three months, Ford called to offer Rama a job as an engineer that was too good to pass up. They packed their bags and Jeet started another job search.
“It was her first job and she didn’t want to let it go,” Jeet says. “It was very hard for me. My employer didn’t take it well when I told him I was leaving.”
Ford made it easier by paying for professional placement assistance for Jeet. He interviewed at three Detroit area companies and accepted a job in June 1994 at Gala & Associates, a Beverly Hills, Mich. engineering firm.
“This was not fun, but it was an experience,” Jeet says.
Consultants who help working partners of relocating employees say it can be a stressful time.
“Some careers are very transportable-like being a teacher or a physician, or in the Detroit area, being an engineer,” says Chait, of relocation assistance.
But when jobs are not so transportable, the trailing spouse may face months of unemployment or a pay cut when they do find work. The stress can be compounded.
“There’s a built-in feeling of one’s worth tied into salary,” Chait says.
If moves within the United States are complicated for two-career couples, international moves are even more difficult.
John Harrison, manager of International Service at Ford, says the biggest problem in international moves is that laws in most countries prevent spouses from working.
“The immigration laws are basically put together to keep people out,” he says.
That’s why some companies hire the trailing spouse so he or she can work, said Andre Arbelaez, director of operations at Pan American Languages & Services in Troy, Mich., a firm which conducts orientation for employees relocating overseas.
Children also complicate dual-career moves, regardless of whether they are in this country or another.
More than 70 percent of job transfers involve families with children, according to Runzheimer International, a Rochester, Wis.-based corporate travel consultancy.
“Often the children, after (the age of) 8, build a certain amount of resentment toward their parents,” says Arbelaez. “They are being taken away from friends.”
That’s why in some instances, the relocating employee moves first, while the trailing spouse stays behind with the children to finish up the school year.
That arrangement is also stressful because the trailing spouse then becomes an instant single parent, facing more complicated child care arrangements without the back-up of a partner, Chait says.
Looking for a job in the new city without adequate child care is also a challenge.
In any case, couples need to be prepared to compromise, says Jay Rathbun, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan.
“A lot of newlyweds approach sharing of responsibilities in a pretty rigid 50-50 kind of way,” he says. “But (true) equity is (quite) different. It’s who is best suited to do what, when.”
For some two-career couples, the best decision is simply not to relocate together.
David Britt and LaRue Allen, a couple in their fifties, have lived apart frequently during their 13 years of marriage. He is a sociology professor at Detroit’s Wayne State University; She is chairman of the applied psychology department at New York University. They see each other every two or three weeks, when Britt usually flies to New York.
Even when they met at an academic conference in Maryland in 1980, Britt was working in Florida, and Allen in Maryland.
As their careers progressed, they often found themselves living in different cities. The last time they lived together was in Detroit from 1991 to 1994, but then Allen got a job in New York.
“For a woman, the toughest part is the extent to which my making these career choices violates people’s assumptions about how women ought to behave,” she says.
“I think there is also a fair amount of presumptuousness that the relationship must also be in trouble, when it has to be good to survive this.”
But she warns: “Not everybody should try this.”
Universities, more than private employers, often go out of their way to accommodate working spouses by offering them jobs, say Colette Murray.
On two different occasions, university employers who recruited Murray also offered jobs to her husband. Once, he took the job, and the other time he turned it down and started his own firm.
Some employers even offer relocation assistance to the live-in partners of unmarried transferring employees. In 1993, 11 percent of companies had formal programs for partners, compared with five percent in 1988.
