Anne-Marie Slaughter's Husband Speaks Out

Three years after Anne-Marie Slaughter’s dynamite Atlantic cover story, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” her husband, Princeton professor Andrew Moravcsik, is going public about his role in their dual-career marriage.

Moravcsik’s own Atlantic essay, “Why I Put My Wife’s Career First,” chronicles the highs and lows of his and Slaughter’s decision to designate him the “lead parent” to their two sons. To Moravcsik, lead parenting means “being on the front lines of everyday life”—going to soccer games, helping with homework, getting the kids in bed, etc.—and he admits that he’s suffered professional consequences for doing so.

“Over the past decade,” he writes, “the quantity and quality of my research has suffered, yet I remain a productive political scientist at a top university. In most careers outside of academia, however, my role as a lead dad would have been impossible.”

Moravcsik also describes the cultural and social difficulties inherent in men taking on a majority of home responsibilities: “The very idea of men as lead parents still makes many people uncomfortable at a deep and often subconscious level. Nothing quiets a dinner-party conversation more quickly than a chance mention of the fact that my wife outearns me.”

Still, he believes their arrangement to prioritize Slaughter’s career over his own has worked for their family, and that it’s been worth it despite the challenges. He urges more men to take the lead at home, saying, “At the end of life, we know that a top regret of most men is that they did not lead the caring and connected life they wanted, but rather the career-oriented life that was expected of them. I will not have that regret.”

Like Slaughter’s original article, this piece is an important must-read. Send it to all the men you know, and we’d love to hear your thoughts (and theirs) in the comments.

About the Author

Julianne Helinek is Take The Lead's blog editor and writer of the newsletter Take The Lead This Week. She thinks the women she knows are too talented not to be running the world, and she’s especially interested in bringing more men into the gender equality conversation. Julianne is an MBA student at NYU’s Stern School of Business. For more on feminism in the business school world, follow her on Twitter at @thefeministmba.