In these marriages, says Myers, “there is an ebb and flow of careers. One partner may take a back seat for a while, and then get an appealing opportunity. So they move for that person’s job, and the other partner takes a back seat. In these relationships, we see a lot of outsourcing of childcare to nannies and family members.”
Jules Pieri, founder and CEO of the Daily Grommet, a product launch website based outside of Boston with 29 employees, has three sons, ages 23, 21 and 17. Her husband specialises in sales and marketing for turnaround companies. When their children were little, she describes their home life as a “ballet”.
“Someone was taking the lead, and someone was in the background. We alternated who took the lead. It was tacit; it wasn’t overt. When you have little kids [and you each have a demanding job], the questions are: Who gets to travel without even thinking about it? Who’s going to be home for the nanny? It was more difficult when I took two years off from work because we lapsed into traditional [gender] roles and the traditional resentments that come with that.”
Pieri’s husband “takes pride” in her success and appreciates that she is “very ambitious”, she says. “He gets my kind of work. He’s been a CEO so he knows what it’s like. Tomorrow my day starts at 7am, and it ends with a meeting that starts at six. He knows not to hold dinner.”
Karen Quintos, who has three school-age kids, is the chief marketing officer at Dell. She says that she and her husband Tony have “both had to make compromises given that we are both career-minded people.” She met her husband when she was at Merck and he had just accepted a big role at Citibank. “He had to commute back and forth between New York and Tampa. After two years of this, we decided someone’s career had to ‘give’. Our son was 18 months old at the time. I followed Tony to Citibank, where I worked for three years. I then decided to move to Dell, and he followed me here.”
Her husband worked for Dell for several years before they decided that one of them needed to be home more with their children during their teens. “As I moved into the chief marketing officer role at Dell two years ago and the demands for my time grew, this flexibility – Tony being home – became more important. It provides us with more work/life harmony. My kids sometimes travel with me; sometimes Tony does. I also realise that not everyone has this flexibility, but having a spouse that supports me, and I him, is huge.”
Martha Josephson, mother of two, says that when she first landed a job at Egon Zehnder International, the executive search company, she “staffed up at the office and staffed up at home” because her husband also had a demanding job. “I delegated every annoying personal task I could,” she says. “And at work, I focused on the value-added things because I was gunning for partner.”
Josephson made partner and today is the firm’s global internet practice head based in Palo Alto. She and her husband, whose career had taken off earlier and who was a stay-at-home parent for a couple of years to help their special needs child, eventually divorced. “There’s a lot of strain that gets put on a marriage. We are divorced because of the dichotomy between the paces of our work lives…. Many couples will say that only one person can have a CEO job,” she says.
