Behind many powerful women on Wall Street: A doting ‘househusband’

That was no simple task. Though the Donohoe children are close in age, each goes to a different school and has different extracurricular activities. Matt drove their 13-year-old to hockey practices in New Jersey and took all three kids to Boston for a tournament. In between, there were groceries to buy, meals to prepare and homework to assist with.

It was all in a day’s work for Matt, who quit his job in 2007 to help out at home. A former emerging-markets trader with degrees from Georgetown and Columbia, he is part of a quiet but growing force of men who hold down the fort at home while their wives climb to the upper echelons of finance.

Wall Street has long struggled to elevate and retain women. A hotly competitive industry that demands long hours, frequent travel and the need to be on call constantly, it has been an unwelcoming environment for women, particularly those with children.

Women who have leadership roles in finance say that having a spouse who stays home—a househusband, if you will—can relieve that burden and allow them to rise. Even these privileged women, who have a spouse at home and often extra help beyond that, say maintaining the arrangements is a complex feat.

For the men, being a househusband can come with a stigma: Society often still assumes men will be the bigger earners and women the primary caregivers. But that is starting to change.

In 45% of U.S. opposite-sex marriages, the wife earns as much or more than her husband, a share that has roughly tripled over the past 50 years, according to a 2023 report from Pew Research Center. Dads represented 18% of stay-at-home parents in 2021, up from 11% in 1989, another Pew study found.

There are now househusbands at the highest levels of power. Doug Emhoff, married to Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, gave up his career—as an entertainment lawyer—to facilitate her political rise after she was elected vice president. On Wall Street, the list of women with husbands at home includes the chief executives of Citigroup and TIAA, the chief financial officer of the private-equity firm Vista Equity Partners, and the global co-head of Blackstone’s real-estate business, among others.

Senior female executives whose partners also work say they have to manage an intense balancing act and admit to being envious at times of their peers whose husbands don’t work.

“The prototype of the person you are competing with, the people in nearly all of the successful positions, have a stay-at-home partner," says Suzanne Donohoe, who was a partner at Goldman Sachs and KKR before joining EQT in 2022. “The disheartening part of the message is somehow you can’t achieve if one parent isn’t at home."

She says she doesn’t think that is the case and knows and admires people in demanding jobs who make it work with neither spouse at home.

‘Safety net for a trapeze artist’

Many couples say they started out with parallel professions but reached a point at which the woman’s career accelerated. When one person needed to devote more time to parenting, it made more sense for it to be the man.

Chip Kelly was working in tech sales at an international startup in 2009 when his wife, Natalie Hyche Kelly, who is a Visa executive, gave birth to their first child. After the couple didn’t move quickly enough to get a spot at the daycare they wanted, Chip volunteered to care for the baby and work while she slept.

He took calls while pushing their daughter in the stroller. When she went to sleep, he worked through dozens of emails. The couple had twins a few years later. Around that time, Natalie was promoted and started commuting to San Francisco four days a week from Charlotte, N.C., where the Kellys lived. Chip tried to work while caring for the twins and their older daughter when she wasn’t in preschool.

After the family moved to San Francisco, Chip realized he was neither doing his job nor parenting as well as he wanted to. He decided to devote himself full time to the latter.

“It was kind of becoming a no-brainer because my wife’s career was going so well," he says.

The Kellys are now starting their third year in London, where Natalie serves as the payments company’s chief risk officer for Europe. Chip considered going back to work a few years ago, but so far has decided against that because his family relies on his being at home.

“I’m like the safety net for a trapeze artist," he says. “You don’t think about it unless they take it away."

Kathleen McCarthy Baldwin, Blackstone’s global co-head of real estate, was nursing her second child in 2015 when her husband, Matt Baldwin, left his job as the CFO of a research firm and decided to take some time off.

“The idea of him not working made me very anxious, mostly because of my fears about what it would do to our marriage," she says. “Would I be envious that he had more time with the children? Would he resent that I had this really exciting and demanding job?"

Matt told her he wasn’t worried. After spending a summer with their daughters at the Jersey Shore while Kathleen mostly worked in the city, Matt decided to make the change permanent.

These days, he rises at 5:30 a.m., before the rest of the house is awake. He makes oatmeal for the family four mornings a week, giving himself one morning off. On most days, Kathleen takes the girls to school while Matt goes indoor rock climbing.

After school, he and their nanny divide the responsibilities, with one taking the older daughter to sports practice, drama and guitar lessons and the other transporting the younger one to swimming lessons, violin and dance. Matt, who has become a skilled cook, usually makes dinner. Specialties include salmon, soft-cooked eggs and spicy pasta.

Kathleen says her husband’s decision to stay home created the flexibility for her to pursue other interests outside work such as serving on the board of an anti-hunger nonprofit.

“When I talk with other women in this position, we all say our husbands are a very special breed," she says. “They don’t define themselves by their jobs."

Awkward moments

Not all men are as comfortable in the position.

One stay-at-home dad whose wife works in private wealth at an investment bank says he sometimes tells other men that he manages real estate—technically true because the family owns a few buildings. He says he can identify other men in his position at private-school functions when they say they “manage investments" or “run a boutique hedge fund."

“We’re all out there, but we can’t say anything about it," he says.

Paul Sullivan has been trying to change that. He founded a group called the Company of Dads after leaving his job as a columnist for the New York Times in 2021. Sullivan’s wife runs an asset-management firm and became very busy with work after the Covid-19 pandemic.

Sullivan already defined himself as what he dubs a “lead dad," the go-to parent for everything from playdates and doctors’ appointments. But he found no support groups for men in his position. He reached out to senior female executives and asked them about the idea of creating one. They approved. Some said their husbands didn’t help enough. Others said their husband’s friends made fun of them, calling them names like “Mr. Mom."

“Two things can be true at once," Sullivan says. “Moms can be discriminated against in the workplace, and dads can be afraid to take a lead role at home."

Sullivan now organizes events for lead dads such as a Father’s Day beer fest and a March Madness get-together. He gives talks at workplaces and hosts a podcast on which he interviews therapists, parenting coaches and fatherhood advocates. He counts the husbands of Goldman Sachs partners, JPMorgan Chase managing directors and top law partners among his members.

For the Donohoes, having Matt at home has meant that he has developed a close bond with his children. Suzanne says it has given her credibility with her colleagues when she needs to attend one of their doctor’s appointments or sporting events.

There are still mix-ups. Schools often call Suzanne first if one of the children is sick or needs permission to do something even though Matt is listed first on contact forms. Once it happened when she was in London on business. She gently asked the school administrator to call her husband. He was at their apartment five minutes away.