education secretary miguel cardona in philadelphia. this administration simply put supports teachers and we have your back. why education? we need to support our teachers. i ve been teaching myself part time and also traveled the country. i ve met so many teachers, especially during the height of the pandemic, who had to completely readjust what they re doing, kids, how they re dealing with them and also just the mental health aspect for our children and for the teachers themselves. so this is something that i ve always been passionate about. you mentioned my wife, the vice president. that s kind of cool to say. i m the only person in history who is able to say that. you said that when you come home at the end of the day, your wife, the vice president, says so, dougie, what did you do today? every time i come home. she will do it tonight.
to the administration. so it hasn t been a lot of time for the ceremonial part. maybe there will be moving forward. was there any part of you that thought well, i better do the ceremonial stuff because that s what a woman would do? well, i don t want to genderrize it. i think we re a married couple and we do a lot of these things together. so if there s things that we need to pick out or decorations or if we re having an event and i ll give my input, but it s how we are as a typical married couple, what we would do in our other life. we look at things together. we pick it out and we re both busy and we move on. so i m not trying to make it where this is my job. what is your job? first and foremost, it s to support her. we work in an office called office of the vice president and in office that you re
education secretary in philadelphia. this administration simply put supports teachers. we have your back. why education? we need to support our teachers. i ve been teaching myself part-time, and also traveled the country, i met so many teachers, especially during the height of the pandemic, who had to completely readjust what they re doing. kids, how they re dealing with them, also just the mental health aspect for our children and the teachers themselves. this is something i ve always been passionate about. you mentioned my wife, the vice president. that s kind of cool to say. i m the only person in history who is able to say that. you said when you come home at the end of the day, your wife says hey, dougie, what did you do today? every time. she ll do it tonight.
i don t know if you ve heard this, but sometimes men have some fragile egos. i read about that. did yours get bruised at all? in all candor. i have a very healthy ego. i m very confident, and i also realize this was an incredible opportunity for the country to have the first woman vice president and to have a man in this role. so yes, i love my career, i was very successful, and i do miss it at times. but if i was going to leave, what better reason to leave than this? and to support her. we talked about it, and we made that decision together that it was worthwhile, me taking this pretty major step back from what i was doing. you use the word support, and i think there are a lot of men who intellectually want to
right now? i think men need to look at women as equals and treat them and it s not an either or. it s not a zero sum game. when we lift up women, we re going to lift up our economy. we re going to lift up everything. it s not at the detriment of men. so that s what we need. there s still a bit of a stigma with the notion of men taking a step back and being openly supportive of a woman who has a bigger role and a bigger job than the man does. are you trying to intentionally destigmatize that? definitely, definitely. you think about it? i do. i do, not at the beginning because this was a no brainer, but now that i m in the role and you really see like not all men naturally would do this and would push back and then