“A woman CEO has a special strain: she needs to make sure her husband does not feel like the nanny. A stay-at-home spouse in these relationships can’t feel like hired hands. It happens to men and women.”
Mom: The anchor job
Myers nicknames the third model “mom the moneymaker”. “Her career is the anchor job in the family. The dad either doesn’t work at all or works in a job that has more flexibility, such as real estate or consulting. His job takes a backseat. We’re seeing this model more and more.”
Gail Galuppo, COO and co-founder of BankersLab, a Chicago-based company that provides training platforms to retail banks, is a mother of three teenagers. When her kids were little and Galuppo was climbing the ranks at companies from Standard Chartered Bank to Sears Holdings to GE – where she was made a vice-president at the age of 31 – she employed a full-time nanny to handle the childcare. Her husband worked in sales. While his job was more flexible, they both had significant travel demands. In her role as chief marketing officer at Western Union, for example, Galuppo spent 80% of her time on the road.
“We had a wonderful nanny who was with us for many years. But the nanny can’t do everything,” she says, noting that a paid childcare provider won’t necessarily detect behavioral changes in a child or know how to deal with homework issues.
When one of their children began having difficulty in school, Galuppo and her husband decided to make a change. “That’s the challenge for every dual-career relationship: at some point you have to make a bet on whose career is going to take off,” she says. “My husband understood my career path, and he saw I was on a roll.”
For the past seven years, Galuppo’s husband has been a stay-at-home parent. “He’s been the one who takes the kids to their activities, to school, to the doctor, and meets with teachers and school counsellors. He does the grocery shopping and the dry cleaning. He said to me: ‘I want you to focus on your career. I don’t want you to focus on the little things.’”
Support from a spouse is paramount to steering a successful career and personal life, according to a recent survey of 270 successful women by Kathy Korman Frey, a faculty member at the George Washington School of Business Center for Entrepreneurial Excellence. In response to the question, “How do you do it?” nearly half of the women surveyed said: “support from my spouse or life-partner.” Other responses included: job design, work/life priorities and boundaries, and home services.
Not every husband whose wife has a higher powered and higher paying job has such an enlightened perspective, however. Jealousy and competition are common themes in these relationships. “We still have some residual, traditional gender attitudes in the US,” says Unger, the author. “Men are supposed to be visibly stronger and economically stronger. When it’s the woman with the anchor job and the man is earning less money and doing more of the domestic work or parenting, he has to be at peace with that. He has to not feel threatened.”
