In conversation with Bobbi Thomason

A survey of Harvard Business School graduates — ambitious, educated, the ones who were supposed to have figured it out — found that the women expected equal partnerships and the men expected their careers to come first.

The men's expectations were exceeded.

Bobbi Thomason is a professor at Pepperdine's business school, a Stanford-trained engineer, tenured ahead of schedule, and one of the leading researchers in her field on women, work and negotiation. She also moved across the country for her husband's job while studying exactly why women move across the country for their husband's jobs.

Her conclusion, after fifteen years of research: if you're having the conversation about equality in your marriage, you've probably already lost the battle. The decisions that shape everything — who moves, who steps back, who gets the bigger career — tend to be made before anyone sits down to talk.

This conversation is for anyone who has ever been managed, undermined, talked over or passed over. Which, the data suggests, is most of us — as Bobbi makes clear, this isn't only about women.

Her book, Vows to Ourselves, publishes March 2027 from HarperCollins.

Have something to say? I'm all ears.

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Want more between essays and episodes? Below the Fold is where I publish shorter dispatches on the stories worth paying attention to—from the people in my own backyard to the forces reshaping the wider world.

Credits:

Host: Meredith Ogilvie-Thompson

Sound Editing: Dax Krishna and the team at SpeechDocs

Music: Ilya Kuznetsov