Hey, no to self-listeners. It's Manouche Samarote. We've got a little bonus for you. Yes, we just wrapped up our four-part series about women and work called Taking the Lead.

The last interview I did for that series was with Andrew Moravczyk. You heard a few clips of it in part four, the final chapter.

But Andy is so awesome. We really wanted to give you our full conversation.

Just some background. Andy is married to Ann Marie Slaughter, the CEO and president of New America.

She's the person who wrote that seminal piece in the Atlantic a few years back called Why Women Still Can't Have It All.

It was about how she decided to leave her job eating Hillary Clinton at the State Department.

Why did she leave her dream job? Because Andy, her husband and the family's lead parent, was struggling to deal with one of their sons who was having a really tough time growing up and being a teenager.

Andy, by the way, is also a professor of politics and director of the European Union program at Princeton University.

So he's pretty ambitious himself. And here's what being the lead parent has meant for his career, his psyche and their marriage.

And also why he feels so strongly that the conversation about work-life balance is really about men and their role as caretakers.

We started out like most couples start out, I think, a little bit naive. We thought we're a true career couple and we'll also split the parenting 50-50.

And it turned out that my wife took a succession of jobs. First, it was academic administration, then more complicated academic administration being a dean here at Woodward Wilson School.

And then she was director of policy planning for Hillary Clinton. And now she's head of a NGO that required that she be outside of the home for long periods of time and that constrained her schedule much more than mine was constrained.

And this happened really without us having planned it in advance. And more and more, the only way for us to manage a two career marriage with kids was for me to become the lead dad.

And we negotiated as we went along, but it isn't as if we planned it from the moment we said I do.

Yeah, it's almost, I mean, did you guys sit down and use that word lead parent because I feel like I don't think I was even saying that as recently as two or three years ago.

No, we feel having looking back on our experience that we've learned some things. And one of the things we've learned is that you need to start making up some new language to understand the position we're in.

And then also to legitimate the roles that people are taking, you know, people use words like stay at home dad or full time dad or, you know, Mr. Mom.

And we don't think those words are either they don't make people feel good about themselves. And they aren't legitimating and something like lead dad is a much better word. And also I think a much better description of what lead dads do day to day.

As someone who had a big career himself, did you find that some of your colleagues or I don't know, maybe other parents were kind of like, what the hell are you doing? Why are you stepping back or were they like, oh yeah, and Maria's a powerhouse, you do what you got to do.

I don't think our story is the same as it might be if I were an investment banker or something that really would have forced me to make a choice between the culture of work and the culture of home.

In fact, academia is a pretty progressive and open-minded profession and people do understand when you have to make these choices. But that doesn't mean there isn't a trade-off, right? There's lots of things that I would have liked to do in academia books I would have liked to read meetings I would have liked to have attended, you know, things I would have liked to undertake that I didn't undertake.

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