Balancing: A support system for work and at home

London: The proverb “A good husband makes a good wife” has long been interpreted as advice to husbands that if they treat their spouses well, they will reap the rewards.

However, for millions of working women it has a second meaning, especially when children enter the equation. A good husband is one who takes on the types of qualities and tasks long associated with the wife, such as parenting, cleaning, entertaining and lending a sympathetic ear.

When asked the inevitable work/life balance question, successful women often refer to their partners as the most important enablers of their success. The single biggest career decision Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, says she ever made was not her choice to attend Harvard University or to become one of Silicon Valley’s most powerful technology executives by moving away from the east coast and then jumping to Facebook.

Instead, she told a conference in 2011: “The most important career choice you’ll make is who you marry. I have an awesome husband, and we’re 50-50.”

When her husband David Goldberg died in an accident this year, many obituaries described his support of women in technology, and Sandberg in particular, alongside his own achievements in the sector.

Ian Gooden, director at HR consultancy Chiumento, says that the support you receive from home may be the single biggest enabler of your career success, especially if you have children.

“Once you have a family, you often reach a point where it is quite difficult to have it all — something has to give. You might accept that you’re not going to be so hands-on with the kids or that one of you is going to have a less high-flying job.”

Increasingly, he says, it is the man who takes that step.

Companies and policymakers are beginning to realise this, and are creating gender-neutral rules to reduce the crippling bias that assumes women are the happy homemakers.

Policies such as shared parental leave benefit men who want to play a more active role at home, as well as women who want to keep their careers going after having children.

But such changes have yet to make much of a dent. In a recent survey by the community website Mumsnet, two-thirds of women questioned said their careers had suffered when they became mothers, while almost three-quarters of them said that their life partner’s career had not been affected at all.

Until the cultural bias about traditional women’s roles falls away and the gender pay gap narrows, even well-thought-out government and company policies will struggle to be catalyst of rapid change, recruiters say.

At home, despite anecdotal evidence of a new generation of enlightened men, research suggests that women are still saddled with the significant majority of housework, even when they are the main breadwinner.

And working mothers are not making life easier for themselves by spending as much time parenting as their own stay-at-home mothers did. But the importance of a supportive partner encompasses far more than housework and parenting. They are often a woman’s most loyal adviser and the one who, for example, will nudge her into reaching for a promotion she may feel is beyond her experience, but he knows is well within her capabilities.

Olivia Garfield, chief executive of water company Severn Trent and the youngest female chief executive of a FTSE 100 company, says that she can usually tell which of her female executives will return to work after having a baby. Two equally important influencers of this are whether the woman grew up with a working mother, and whether her partner did.

If you are looking for a husband who will be good for your career, look no further than your future mother-in-law.

— Financial Times