Is The New CEO Accessory A Stay-At-Home Dad?

“My husband, Richard, is a stay at home father and obviously plays a huge part in the whole family life and bringing up the children and the logistics around it. It is quite a logistical challenge. People often have issues about how does one juggle both work and home. I’m afraid I have to say there is no one, single magic solution or silver bullet that I found to solving it all, but it’s great fun as well.”-Helena Morrissey, CEO of Newton Investment Management and mother of nine

It seems that as it becomes more normal for women to be working and making more money than their husbands, it is also more normal for the husbands to take on the traditionally female primary caregiver role. Though we can’t say this conclusively, it seems that for many women in very high positions, such as CEO of a company or executive, part of the key to their success may be that they have a husband at home with the kids instead of a nanny. We want to know why that is happening more and whether it can be linked to their career success?

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Women now fill a majority of jobs in the U.S., including 51.4% of managerial and professional positions, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. About 23% of wives now out-earn their husbands, according to a 2010 study by the Pew Research Center. And this earnings trend is more dramatic among younger people. Women 30 and under make more money, on average, than their male counterparts in all but three of the largest cities in the U.S. And it’s not just in this country that this  is happening. In Britain, one in five women makes more in male-female households. By the time the end of the 1960′s rolled around, only 4% of women between 16 and 60 made more than their partner. Latest figures put that amount at 19%, or about 2.7 million women.

And it seems that a lot of these women, especially those who have advanced into management positions in the past two decades, have figured something out that men have always known according to BusinessWeek writer Carol Hymowitz. “To make it to the top, you need a wife. If that wife happens to be a husband, and increasingly it is, so be it.” The number of men in the U.S. who regularly care for children under age five increased to 32%  in 2010 from 19% in 1988, according to Census figures. Among those fathers with preschool-age children, one in five served as the main caregiver. We asked some people if they agreed with that assessment.

Mallary Tytel, President of Healthy Workplaces, told The Grindstone:

“I cannot speak for female execs in general, but it was an incredible luxury having a husband at home when my career took off. It was not planned – he became ill and decided to sell his retail business and take time off to regroup. At the time I was working as a senior-level consultant for the US Army and traveled a great deal. Our kids were teens at the time, we had two
dogs, and having someone at home who cared was a relief as well as liberating. When he recovered, we decided together that he would retire (to pursue volunteering, writing, etc) and I would be the bread winner.

From Washington I was recruited to step in as CEO of an international non-profit. My days were long and, again, travel frequent. It was a great relief not to have to worry about home. Dinner was waiting for me, the house was in order, at times we traveled together – little things made a big difference. In addition, himself a brilliant serial entrepreneur, my husband was a great resource to me as a sounding board, coach, and cheerleader. I chuckle when I think about our traditional-roles reversal, and hearing him say things to me that I said to him 15 years earlier: “You should have called, dinner is ruined!” I have been very fortunate to have his support.”

But why does it seem that specifically a high-powered career woman needs her spouse at home? Why not a nanny with a spouse that works outside the home as well? “People used to say that men needed a wife at home and a wife at the office — the traditional secretary,” Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter says. “Now women need the same thing: an assistant at work and a stay-at-home husband or at least a husband who’s very flexible and supportive. Anyone who hopes to be a corporate chief executive needs a big support system.”

Whitney Johnson, a founding partner of Rose Park Advisors, Clayton M. Christensen’s investment firm and former analyst for Merrill Lynch, weighed in on this subject for The Grindstone. She works full-time and her husband is the primary caregiver for their children.

“I barely make time for everything. He is managing the corporate household. I’m not taking the kids to school, he is. There are always tradeoffs. I cant think of anybody I know where both spouses are really high-powered, career climbers and if they are, their children pay such a high price. In a perfect world you get one spouse that goes out and one that works and is fulfilled too but is also with the kids primarily.”

Having one parent be the primary caregiver or one who is just physically around more, even if there is a nanny, seems to make for a better familial support system for both the children and the spouses. Roy Cohen, career coach and author of The Wall Street Professional’s Survival Guide, told The Grindstone:

“It’s not uncommon for high-powered female executives to have stay-at-home spouses. I know this for a fact since I have several married senior executive women in my private practice. It is always an asset when children are involved. Successful families need at least one parent to oversee all of the resources and logistics involved in navigating their children’s hyper scheduled lives.”

Career coach and author of Wander Woman: How High-Achieving Women Find Contentment and Direction, Dr. Marcia Reynolds told The Grindstone:

“I have found that most of the high-achieving women do best with a husband who has a job that either keeps him at home (i.e. software design, Internet-based or connecting with clients by phone) or keeps him in town and not traveling. Even if he has a business, if he is capable of managing the home, that has helped. I find that the women were fine with being the breadwinners but they rarely supported the man totally. He contributed in some way to the finances. I think this makes for some mental as well as fiscal health.”

Though it seems like this formula does prove to help women have very successful careers. Other CEOs with this setup include Bare Escentuals Chairman Leslie Blodgett, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina and Dawn Lepore, President, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Board of drugstore.com and former CIO of Charles Schwab, to name a few. But just like women got sick of being the ones that were home all the time and didn’t get credit for their work, men may start to resent this role too. As Morrissey said, there is never one simple, automatic solution to the work/life balance issue. Kathleen Christensen, program director at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, says we’re back to the 1950s, only “instead of Jane at home, it’s John. But it’s still one person doing 100% of work outside the home and the other doing 100% at home.” Just as we saw the Feminine Mystique in the 1960s among frustrated housewives, Christensen predicts, “we may see the Masculine Mystique in 2020.” And won’t that be a sight to see.