The author's wife quit her job to become a full-time mom. I would guess that the author was only able to have so much professional success because of this. Perhaps you can't get tenure/be really successful while also taking care of a child with disabilities. It just happens to be the case that the author didn't have to take care of a child with disabilities (his wife did), and so his professional career was unaffected.
When I was a PhD student, I asked everyone about this, but I could find no role model. Almost every male professor had a stay-at-home wife who cared for the kids, and female professors often had no kids. Even with my fellow PhD students who became parents, it was always the mothers who took extended maternity leave, and the fathers who advanced their careers.
(I eventually gave up the PhD programme; as a self-employed software developer I now have the freedom to take as much time for my kids as I want, and I can take an equal part in caring for them.)
1. Paternity leave 2. Child care facilities
Paternity leave is important to break the stereotype that mothers are the ones who have to sacrifice their careers to stay at home and care for the family. Widely available child care allow both parents to work as much as they need.
Anecdotal evidence from the senior staff I know here at the University says that male professors don't have stay-at-home wives, and female professors have kids (with no noticeable difference compared to the rest of society).
http://matt.might.net/articles/tenure/#addendum
Maybe you don't consider founding and running a 501(c)(3) non-profit like http://NGLY1.org/ a career for her, but I do.
And, more importantly, she does.
Because if you answer yes, you are full of it.
I find the other comments full of praise tarnished by their elision of this crucial detail. This is the story of a family, not a man.
Very few people get to their thirties without realising that a marriage is a partnership and that having a family is a demanding project which requires a lot of work.
Society used to be legally structured around a system where people were paired on a gender system optimized for a nuclear family, where both individuals contribute their labor to their common good while one receives all of the autonomy, financial control, status, praise, and respect; the one who received all of this was always male.
The only thing that has changed is that women are legally allowed to be the breadwinner. Enormous social and economic structures still pressure them into being the less valued member of the family unit. Domestic labor is still heavily undervalued, disrespected, and seen as a woman's sphere. The number of full time fathers is still extremely low, and people still judge family units with a full time father as less prosperous than one with a full time mother.
When we descend by class and race down the social hierarchy, the picture becomes extremely complicated, of course.
But I was just talking about Internet comments, you know?
> The author certainly spares no effort in praising his partner.
Though it appears he did so after being prompted by a (female!) questioner asking what his wife's up to; he wrote the original Quora answer without mentioning anything about how her career was altered.
I see no comments below where that crucial detail was relevant to mention, only a number of a comments that express that they found the post interesting and enlightening?
http://matt.might.net/articles/tenure/#addendum
And, in fact, an extended family story -- of my parents, my brothers and her sisters that all help out on a daily basis.
All of us know that the main takeawy of the story is about you. Your desperate disclaimers don't do anything.
>At first, she gave up a promising career in start-ups to care full-time for Bertrand
Emphasis added on at first. While jt doesnt sound like she went back to that career, he then goes on to list a lot of achievements that were way beyond simply being a full time mom.
So, the true bottom line of this story is that he made a very shrewd political move (in the process compromising the privacy of his disabled child) in order to ensure tenure.
IIRC if you match childless single men and women by educational attainment and job experience the gender pay gap is about 3%. But most women downshift or exit their careers after having children and most men don't. Anyone with a really dedicated support staff or person is at a massive advantage when competing against those without. The only single people with support as dedicated as a competent spouse have butlers. Even corporate executives with personal assistants don't have that kind of always available, for all tasks help, not in the overwhelming majority of cases.
Couples in other countries with working child care systems do not share this experience.