NYT -
Wall Street Mothers, Stay-Home Fathers
By JODI KANTOR and JESSICA SILVER-GREENBERG
As Husbands Do Domestic Duty, These Women Are Free to Achieve
Marielle Jan de Beur often catches the 6:27 a.m. train to Grand Central Terminal,
waiting on the Westchester platform with a swarm of dark-suited men,
and then walks 10 blocks to a Park Avenue office fronted by the fountain
where Audrey Hepburn cavorted in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” playing a
woman scheming to marry a wealthy man.
But when the elevator lets her off at Wells Fargo, she enters another
zone, where the gender dynamic that has long underpinned the financial
industry is quietly being challenged. Ms. Jan de Beur and some of her
colleagues rely on support that growing numbers of women on Wall Street
say is enabling them to compete with new intensity: a stay-at-home
husband.
In an industry still dominated by men with only a smattering of women in
its highest ranks, these bankers make up a small but rapidly expanding
group, benefiting from what they call a direct link between their
ability to achieve and their husbands’ willingness to handle domestic
duties. The number of women in finance with stay-at-home spouses has
climbed nearly tenfold since 1980, according to an analysis of census
data, and some of the most successful women in the field are among them.
When Ms. Jan de Beur flew to Hong Kong last spring to persuade Asian
investors to re-enter the bond market, her husband took their daughter
to try on confirmation dresses. Her colleagues Allison Poliniak and Gina
Martin Adams share a running commentary on their husbands’ efforts in
the kitchen. Nicole Black recently texted her husband, Drew Skinner, as
she headed home after a long day of earnings calls. “You want to hit the
gym? Go for it,” he replied, agreeing to spend another hour with their
two small sons.
“While I was dating Drew and getting married and having kids, I’ve gone
from vice president to director to managing director,” Ms. Black said.
These marriages are Wall Street-specific experiments in money, work,
family and power. In interviews, dozens of couples provided field notes
on their findings.
Many discovered that even with babysitting and household help, the
demands of working in finance made a two-career marriage impossible. The
arrangement can be socially isolating, they said, leaving both partners
out of a child-rearing world still full of “Mommy and Me” classes. The
couples told of new questions of marital etiquette, like who makes the
big financial decisions or buys the wife’s jewelry when she makes upward
of a million dollars a year and the husband earns little or nothing.
It is not clear, however, if these couples are leaders in the march
toward gender equality or examples of how little is shifting on Wall
Street. The banks say they want to hire and retain more women.
But the solution that turns out to work so well for these women is an
inaccessible option for many others, since it requires one spouse to
give up a career and the other to earn enough money to support the
family. Rather than changing the culture of the banks, which promote
policies on flexible hours and work life balance, these women say that
to succeed they must give in to its sometimes brutal terms, from 4:45
a.m. wake-ups onward through days of ceaseless competition.
Along the way, the couples have come to question just what is male
behavior and female behavior, noting how quickly their preconceived
notions dissolve once they depart from assigned roles. The men echo
generations of housewives, voicing concern over a loss of earning power
and car pool-induced torpor but also pride in their nurturing roles. The
women describe themselves as competitive, tough and proud of every
dollar they bring in.
“We’re almost like an opposite ’50s couple,” said Mr. Skinner, Nicole
Black’s husband. “I’m staying at home, I do the dishes, I do the
laundry, I do everything the housewife does. I’m just a dude.”
Not every marriage proceeds as smoothly. One female banker told
colleagues that she recently became irritated with her husband, who
works part time, telling him, “I wish I had a wife.”
“You can get one when I can get one,” he replied.
Role Reversals
Rye, N.Y., is not an obvious place to mount a stand against established
social roles. The town, on the moneyed coast of Long Island Sound, has
long been populated by bankers, including John J. Mack, the former chief
executive of Morgan Stanley. The clubs at the end of Stuyvesant Avenue
have dress codes and sports like lawn bowling, and despite high property
taxes, the town has no school buses, a special torture for working
parents.
But even Rye has a set of bankers with stay-at-home husbands, among them
Ms. Jan de Beur, an executive in Wells Fargo’s research department, and
her architect-turned-artist husband, Jim Langley.
When they married 13 years ago, some of Ms. Jan de Beur’s male
colleagues scoffed, suggesting that she would become useless in the
workplace. Marriage turned out to be one of her better career moves. By
the time she became pregnant, her husband was working extremely long
hours for an architecture firm that was pressuring him to relocate, and
he made less than half of what she did. The solution seemed obvious.
Ten years later, the life they have put together feels comfortable and
well ordered: two bright, talkative children, 10 and 7 years old; a
white-clapboard house that feels more cozy than imposing; and time in a
sunny third-floor studio for Mr. Langley, who keeps books of work by
Andrew Wyeth and Winslow Homer on his shelves. He has moments of wonder
with his children, like playing kickball during a summer rainfall and
making anatomical sculptures from tree branches.
In interviews, Ms. Jan de Beur, driven and precise, praised her
husband’s nurturing skills. Mr. Langley sounded proud if a bit taken
aback by his wife’s success. “I’m aware of how lucky I am,” he said.
Still, his wife, along with other women in the same situation, suspects
that the arrangement is harder on the men. Some of Mr. Langley’s peers
say the chatter at backyard gatherings about bonuses can make them
wince: If a half-million-dollar salary is considered unimpressive in
some Wall Street circles, where does that leave them?
When people ask what he does, Mr. Langley could say artist — he gives
the buildings and landscapes he paints expressive personalities of their
own — but he has just begun trying to sell his work. Other fathers in
similar situations say they often tell white lies: They are retired,
they are consultants, they work at home.
Mr. Langley generally goes with “stay-at-home dad.”
“That’s what I call myself,” he said over lunch at a restaurant in Rye,
the other tables filled with groups of women. “I wouldn’t say I like
it.”
What response does he get?
“There’s usually a long pause,” he said.
Feeling Excluded
Half a century ago, Betty Friedan wrote “The Feminine Mystique” not far
from where some of the female bankers live today. Even though their
husbands have had far different experiences and options than Ms.
Friedan’s frustrated 1960s housewives, they sometimes express similar
sentiments.
Some wonder what has come of their education, confess that they do not
know how to make their way back to work after what they had hoped would
be a temporary break, or admit that they do not quite understand their
wives’ work. Others have turned themselves into eager helpmates, booking
their spouses’ massages and mastering complicated cooking techniques.
But many of the wives say their husbands approach parenthood differently
than women do. The stay-at-home mothers in Rye often congregate at
spinning or yoga classes, but their male counterparts all seem to have a
hobby involving a boat: sailing, building wood kayaks and, in Mr.
Langley’s case, depicting fishing dinghies and half-finished hulls in
his paintings. Despite their wealth, the men seem largely resistant to
relying on nannies and babysitters, facing down screaming toddlers and
constant meal preparation with go-it-alone stoicism.
Brandee McHale, a managing director of Citigroup’s charitable
foundation, says her husband, a former Marine, does not multitask,
noting that for him, “Laundry is an activity.” But she also appreciates
that he will focus just as intently on tossing a football with their
children.
A few women said that they resented the fact that their husbands did not
cook or clean up, but that they had trouble telling them so, for fear
that they would sound as if they were treating them like employees.
When Kristine Braden, also of Citigroup, was stationed in the
Philippines, she knew that her husband was never going to devote himself
to hosting parties for her clients or setting a perfect table, the way
some wives of male bankers did. (The couple entertained at restaurants
or at home together on weekends.) Few of the men are willing to take on
corporate spouse duties, like attending or hosting Wall Street dinners
with the alpha men who work at the banks.
The husbands often feel excluded from the social infrastructure that
women have built up over generations to make stay-at-home life more
manageable and fun. (“You want awkward? Try a swim play date,” one
father said.) Every man interviewed said that many school notices,
invitations and Girl Scout troop updates were still sent to their wives,
a river they are constantly trying to divert.
When Ed Fassler, married to Marcie Fassler, a vice president of
operations at PNC Financial Services in Pittsburgh, was helping out with
a school wrapping paper sale, the mothers gathered to go over the order
— and excluded him. “My husband wouldn’t be happy if you’re in my house
with us,” the organizer told him.
In March, Mr. Langley is renting space to mount a show of his paintings,
and his home studio is cluttered with canvases and taped-together
snapshots of the local landscape. In a test run in September, he offered
two paintings for sale at an art auction
in town. It was a community charity event, the buyers friends from the
neighborhood. When both pieces sold, the larger fetching $1,400, husband
and wife both felt relief.
Maintaining Focus
In search of remedies, four of JP Morgan Chase’s top women decided to
fan out across the country last summer to find out why too many women at
the nation’s largest bank, and across the industry, still seemed
somewhat stuck in their ascent.
For years, JP Morgan and other banks have tried recruitment and
retention efforts aimed at women, including “speed mentoring” (Wells
Fargo), wine tastings to get to know management (Morgan Stanley),
efforts at hiring women who had taken time off to raise children
(Goldman Sachs) and clubs for female bankers (Citigroup alone has 60).
When Diane Schumaker-Krieg, Ms. Black’s and Ms. Jan de Beur’s boss,
worked at Credit Suisse years ago, the chief executive at the time, Mr.
Mack, even flew her and other promising women to his home for a golf
tutorial to help them network on the greens.
Still, women make up just 16 percent of bank executives, according to
the consulting firm Catalyst, and only a tiny number run the huge
revenue-generating businesses like investment banking and trading,
barely a change from a generation before.
In their meetings with 2,500 women at seven JP Morgan offices, the four
executives — including Mary Callahan Erdoes, the chief executive of the
bank’s asset management division, and Marianne Lake, the chief financial
officer — heard the same messages again and again.
Flex time allowing employees to work from home one or more days a week
carried stigma, the women felt. Some said they were reluctant to chase
promotions that could require moves upending their families. Many female
bankers still quit after having children.
One morning last month, around the time Ms. Lake was departing for a
similar round of meetings in Asia, Ms. Black arrived at her cluttered
desk at Wells Fargo’s office in Charlotte, N.C., and slid on her headset
to hear the latest Viacom earnings.
She tapped out a message for institutional investors, dropped in on a
morning meeting to brief salespeople and traders, wrote a memo to
clients about why she was downgrading Cisco’s debt, and gave a talk to
the sales force on a new bond, all before the clock struck 9:30. During
that sprint, she was focused entirely on her work.
Ms. Black and others say that is the real gift of a stay-at-home spouse:
avoiding domestic distractions and competing better against other
bankers, many of them men with stay-at-home wives.
If Ms. Black gets a call on Tuesday afternoon asking her to attend an
out-of-town dinner the next night, she can go. Ms. Jan de Beur took two
trips a week on average last spring. Candida P. Wolff, the head of
global government affairs for Citigroup, often travels about one and a
half weeks each month.
Being the breadwinner often means being taken more seriously in the
workplace, they have learned. When one former banker was interviewing at
a private equity firm, she said her prospective employers wanted to
know what her husband did and seemed pleased that he had a low-paying
but flexible job and handled more parenting duties. It dawned on her
that the presumption men had often benefited from — that they would not
be diverted by household demands — was finally applying to her too.
On the home front, the women cast the deciding votes on major financial
decisions. “It’s not like when you and I were growing up and Dad made
all the decisions, but I still control the purse strings,” Ms. Black
said.
At Wells Fargo’s modernist tower on Park Avenue, Ms. Schumaker-Krieg,
the global head of research, economics and strategy for the bank, is
making new recommendations on how to retain and advance female
employees. She has spent decades persuading women on her team not to
quit, even when they are put on bed rest during pregnancy or give birth
to a child with special needs. And she would like others in the industry
to follow suit.
She acknowledges that part of the problem is the fundamental nature of
the business: the ceaseless race to score the big deals and anticipate
market moves. Soon she will complete year-end tallies, ranking the
research analysts, including Ms. Black and Ms. Jan de Beur, against
their competitors and each other.
Some of the women with stay-at-home husbands are her top performers.
When she calls those men “the wind beneath our wings,” she sounds both
kind and calculating; the more domestic responsibility the men are
willing to assume, the more their wives can help the bank make money.
“It’s easy to slide into irrelevance by backing off just a little,” she warned.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/08/us/wall-street-mothers-stay-home-fathers.html?emc=eta1
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