Work Challenges and Coping Strategies of Professional and Managerial Dual-Career Couples in Malaysia

This paper investigates the challenges of work and coping strategies of professional and managerial dual-career couples in Malaysia using gender role ideology and role salience theoretical framework. Semi-structured qualitative interviews were used to collect data from 23 dual-career couples. The findings identified a number of work challenges faced by the couples such as heavy workloads, long working hours, working away from home, coping with supervisors and the working environment. Evidently, some helpful support and strategies have also been found to help these couples to cope with the challenges such as having a domestic helper, receiving support from family, colleagues and supervisors, and having a flexible working arrangement. Moreover, some useful strategies are also found to be useful to the couples, such as psychological approaches, separating work from family and having good organization and prioritizing skills. The experiences described by the participants reflect their gender role attitude and salience of family and work roles. This paper fills the gap in Malaysian literatures which focus more on women instead of investigation that includes both husband and wife. This study also adds more research on dual-career couples in a non-Western context which are generally lacking. Furthermore, it extends the joint use of gender role ideology and role salience perspectives in examining the context of couples by exhibiting its utility in understanding the Malaysian couples’ experiences.