Here's A Shock for Women

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The higher you go in corporate America, the harder it is to keep two high-octane careers on track, especially when you have children. It is not impossible. Nancy Peretsman, a managing director at Allen & Co., does it; her husband, Bob Scully, is a vice chairman of Morgan Stanley. Edmund Toben, the CIO at Colgate, is the husband of Verizon's Doreen Toben. For a long time, Pat and Steve Sueltz managed too. For 20 years both had bigtime careers at IBM, where Steve was a financial VP and Pat a software development VP. They had one daughter in college, another in fourth grade, a newly renovated home, and a great family balance when Pat, 50, got a job offer from Sun three years ago. Steve, 49, encouraged her to take it, saying, "How can we expect our daughters to be all they want to be if their mother isn't all she wants to be?"