The paper will shed light on problems and fights but also successful work-life-balance strategies of dual career families facing the so far not solved dilemma of balancing career in contexts of academia and care responsibilities in the private sector. Dual career partnerships are defined as couples with higher education qualifications and a lifelong career orientation – both following independent career tracks. As a result of social processes of modernization including historical changes of family and along women’s increasing participation in professional education, more and more couples live in academic and dual career partnerships (see Abele 2010: 25; Solga/Wimbauer 2005: 9f.; Schulte 2002: 256). Do dual career families – aware of being pioneers along their way of life – therefore offer a transformative potential as a kind of catalyst towards social transformations concerning gender relations in academia?

Heike Kahlert (2013) picks up gatekeeping processes in contexts of academia and analyzes gatekeepers and their lifestyle-related leitmotifs as decisive key factors within academic career tracks and along the drop-out of women in academia. Kahlert considers that their attitudes towards combining academic qualification and founding a family, as well as towards working conditions and work culture in academia, play a critical role and act as an important model. “Responsible for recruiting, promoting and supervising young researchers at university” (Kahlert 2013: 43), they socialize young scientists along their interpretative patterns of family and gender relations. What about dual career couples that operate themselves as gatekeepers transforming leitmotifs and gender relations along their academic career path?

At the same time, Kahlert recognizes a transnational change of family leitmotifs in the EU policy – as a shift from „the model of the single male breadwinner or its renewed variant of the modernized bread-winner model“ (2013: 36) towards the concept of the ‚double income family‘ or the ‚dual career family‘. Analyzing this concept, Kahlert sees directed (social, political and economic) efforts for integrating women into the labor market and improving the work-life-balance in this context. She underlines the economic and demographic functionality of equal opportunity efforts. The brain drain-/brain gain-effect in mind, the United States started to implement ‘dual career services’ at universities in the 90s fighting to keep the best researchers in their country. (Based on results of the US Study „Dual Career Academic Couples: What Universities Need to Know“, Londa Schiebinger (2010) analyzes the experiences of the US with practicing ‚Dual Hiring‘ supporting dual career couples.) After the shortage of skilled professionals has been identified, the nowadays “entrepreneurial universities” (Riegraf/Weber 2013) in Germany followed this idea for competitive reasons and developed assistance support programs at numerous universities 10 to 15 years later. Given the "high requirements in systems of academia concerning geographic mobility and time flexibility", they support within “the reciprocal coordination of two academic careers" (Gramespacher/Melzer 2010: 123).

Dual career couples who have been interviewed in an interview study reflect and criticize the procedure, the effectiveness, the focus and implementation of dual career services within universities. Dual career is an element of recruiting strategies and profile building at highly competitive universities. But at the same time, academic work culture and laws on higher education are complicating the effective work of dual career services and the improvement of the situation for dual career families in academia. German universities (see Woelki/Väth 2010) often do not understand ‚dual career‘ as an instrument of family support in their organization with the aim of overcoming previous barriers in careers and with the aim of improving gender competence and promoting equal opportunity and heterogeneity (Gramespacher/Melzer 2010: 126ff.) within the personnel and organizational development of universities (compare as well Schiebinger 2010: 115).

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