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Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior

Volume 12, 2025

Dual-Earner Couples

  • Kristen M. Shockley1, Winny Shen2 and Hope Dodd3
  • 1Department of Management and Entrepreneurship, Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama, USA; email: [email protected] 2Schulich School of Business, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada 3Department of Psychology, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, USA
  • Vol. 12:369-394 (Volume publication date January 2025)
  • First published as a Review in Advance on July 22, 2024
  • Copyright © 2025 by the author(s).
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See credit lines of images or other third-party material in this article for license information.

Abstract

In Western societies, most married working employees are now part of a dual-earner couple, meaning both people are engaged in the paid workforce to some extent. Such arrangements introduce benefits as well as challenges in managing two unique work roles and the shared family domain. In this review, we first summarize research about how dual-earner couples manage work and family, including the division of labor, decision-making processes, and specific behavioral strategies. Next, we discuss research on dual-earner couples’ well-being and quality of life, making explicit comparisons to single-earner couples where possible. We close our review with a discussion of research on the macroenvironment, including how cultural norms and state policies relate to dual-earner couples’ functioning. Lastly, we offer numerous recommendations for future researchers to explore the contexts and conditions that facilitate the blending of dual-earner couples’ work and family roles.

Keyword(s): decision-making, division of labor, dual earners, dual-career couples, joint career strategies, work-family
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2025-06-22
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Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior 12, 369 (2025); https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-110622-053405
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