There's a subcontext here that is separate from the appalling notion of being not interested in what your husband/wife works on. Consider the statement: "My husband's specialty is comparative literature and I don't know what that means" or "My wife is an art historian and I don't know what that means". If I heard one of these statements I would think (to myself) "what an ignoramus!". Well, if it's not OK for those, why is it OK for engineering or science? This brings us to the classic the two cultures debate, articulated simplistically by C. P. Snow but echoed by many, many other scientists. I think the gap has widened in the past decades.