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Thirteen years ago, Fortune wrote about trophy wives: the young, glamorous, second (or third) wives of prominent CEOs. Their only job was to lunch, party, conspicuously consume, and keep their husbands off Viagra. The men we're talking about carpool the kids, coach the soccer team, pay the bills, pick up the dry cleaning, and fix dinner. Talk about trophy! These guys may be every working woman's definition of trophy.
Nobody has measured how widespread this phenomenon is among well-educated, high-salaried couples. But there is clearly a dramatic shift afoot. When FORTUNE attempted this story five years ago, we had to give up. It was hard to find examples and even harder to get anyone to talk publicly about their choices. Everyone was in the closet. Now, says Doreen Toben, CFO at Verizon, "almost all the senior women [here] have husbands at home." So do many women at Sun Microsystems. Of the 187 participants at FORTUNE's Most Powerful Women in Business Summit last spring, 30% had househusbands家庭主夫 — a husband who keeps the house. And of the 50 women on this year's list, more than one-third have a husband at home either full- or part-time.