Alice Fulwood
Wall Street correspondent
Earlier this year, over dinner, a friend was recounting his sister’s experience with the “match”—the programme that pairs graduating medical students in America with hospital jobs. This somewhat random process is often fraught for couples, but not for her and her husband. They would have been happy with almost any location, as her husband works remotely for a tech firm. I was reminded of my sister-in-law and her programmer husband, who upped sticks from California to enable her to attend Harvard Law School. I soon found couples with the same story cropping up everywhere. She was a doctor, lawyer or academic—her job tied to a place—who found it easy to chase her career wherever it led, because his work was “remote”.
Why is this? Men disproportionately hold tech jobs; tech jobs are disproportionately remote. Both these facts could easily be perceived as evidence of women getting the short straw. Getting women into science and tech jobs has long been a goal of feminists. Claudia Goldin, the brilliant winner of last year’s Nobel prize in economics, has shown that women’s participation in the labour force is higher when they can work remotely. Still, when considered in the context of couples, they lead to a more surprising conclusion: the geographic liberation of men greatly benefits their wives.
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