Narratives by women managers about spousal support for their careers

•In this study we put forth a qualitative study of spousal support for the careers of women managers.•Firstly, we investigate how women managers themselves talk about and make sense of their spouses’ support and secondly, we identify the kind of gender order women managers themselves create when discussing their experience of spousal support.•The results suggest that spousal support evolves through the woman manager's career.

SummaryIn this article we present a qualitative study of spousal support for the careers of women managers. The research material consists of the narratives of 25 women managers in Finland. The study has two main implications. Firstly, unlike previous studies, we use a narrative approach to demonstrate that a woman manager's career and spousal support are experienced as ambiguous and evolving over the career. The support was constructed by the women managers as flourishing, irrelevant, deficient or inconsistent. Secondly, to increase our knowledge about gender relations, we combine discussion of the topic with gender order analysis and suggest that gender order is critical for an understanding of the nature of spousal support. We conclude that a male spouse who is willing to break the traditional gender order and provide his wife with various forms of support is often constructed as having a positive influence on the career of his woman manager wife. The study calls attention to families as sites of doing gender.