Gendered Norms and Family Roles in the Narratives of Hungarian Elite Members and Their Partners

Our paper contributes to studies on the enduring underrepresentation of women in elite positions through the analysis of elite members’ and their partners’ narratives on career and partnership. Using a dataset of 34 individual interviews (17 couples) among Hungary’s political, economic, and cultural elite, we explore how narrators project themselves in the context of their marital relationships and family roles. We identify three pairs of narratives during our analysis. Narratives show the positions from where narrators discuss the theme of career and partnership as elite member/partner, power couple/non-power couple, and male/female. Our findings show that narrative positioning is significantly gendered, and it is strongly connected to the traditional gendered role system. Having an elite position or pursuing a career calls for explanation only from women. In the meantime, a non-power couple position calls for explanation from men, which suggests the increasing presence of the norm of equality in the Hungarian elite.