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A stay-at-home spouse in these relationships can’t feel like hired hands

It happens to men and women

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 realize that not everyone has this flexibility, but having a spouse that hitta fru supports me, and I him, is huge.”

Josephson made partner and today is the firm’s global Internet practice head based in Palo Alto

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.”

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. “A woman CEO has a special strain: She needs to make sure her husband does not feel like the nanny. ”

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 fulltime 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 ple, 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.”