What a successful woman needs: a selfless and supportive spouse

Italian politician Licia Ronzulli made a media stir last week when she brought her baby to a voting session at the European Parliament. It was a maternal gesture as she was still breastfeeding. The following article discusses how career women can strike a balance between work and life. After their daughter Annie was born, Gail McGovern and her husband established what came to be known as the "kitchen calendar rule." At the time, McGovern worked for AT&T overseeing 10,000 employees; her husband ran a large unit of Hewlett-Packard. They both needed to travel regularly for work, but one of them also needed to be home for Annie. "We had two monster jobs," recalls McGovern, who today is CEO of the American Red Cross. "In the beginning, we fought about who got to take a particular work trip. Then we instituted the kitchen calendar rule: Whoever booked it first got to take the trip." During those years - ones where McGovern recalls her house as "always a mess" - McGovern left the office at 6:30pm to relieve the nanny and spend evenings with Annie. Once Annie was in bed, McGovern was on conference calls until midnight. Despite their demanding jobs, McGovern and her husband never asked the nanny to work overtime, and they never missed one of Annie's school assemblies. McGovern, a former Harvard Business School professor who also held top management jobs at Fidelity Investments, acknowledges that it wasn't always easy. "You have to love to work, and you have to love to parent.... If you choose your employers wisely and choose your mate wisely, there is no question in my mind you can have it all." At a time when issues like gender inequality in the boardroom and the dearth of women in corporate America continue to make headlines, it is worth asking: How important is the role of a supportive spouse in the lives of high-powered female executives? "Those kind of jobs are all-consuming. For women who have husbands and kids and lives - how do they manage?" asks Betsy Myers, director of the Center for Women and Business at Bentley University in Waltham, Massashusetts. Myers, who leads corporate workshops around the world on the changing nature of women's leadership roles, adds: "Of the hundreds of women I have spoken to who have really made it big, most tell me they could not have gotten to where they are without their incredibly supportive husband.... At least the ones who are still married say this." Research from Stewart Friedman, Wharton practice professor of management and director of the Work/Life Integration Project, finds that young men and women today have a greater understanding of the challenges associated with juggling work obligations with family life. There are signs that the next generation of women CEOs and dual-career couples will have a more egalitarian dynamic in the home. Friedman heads a longitudinal research project that surveys the school's students and alumni on their beliefs and attitudes about two-career relationships. In 1992, he surveyed more than 450 Wharton undergraduate students as they graduated. This past May, he posed the same set of questions to Wharton undergraduates in the Class of 2012. The survey asked questions such as: "To what extent do you agree that two-career relationships work best when one partner is more advanced than the other?" In 1992, men were more likely to agree with such statements than women, but in 2012, men are less likely to agree, but women are more likely to agree. Noha Waibsnaider, founder and CEO of Peeled Snacks, the eight-year-old company that sells healthy snacks to Starbucks, Whole Foods and other locations, has two small children. She says that she and her husband, who is the head of sales at the Brooklyn, NY-based company, are "big believers in work-life balance." "Working crazy hours does not make you more productive or effective," she says. "I try to spend the hours of 5pm to 8pm every day with my kids, and I don't check e-mail during those hours." She employs a full-time nanny, and her mother lives close by and regularly provides childcare. She and her husband split household chores equally. "We're very different, and we have complementary skill sets. I do a lot of the home and kids' organization, and he probably does more of the grocery shopping and cooking. We're both in charge."