Her Professional Ambitions

I am privileged to sit on the Supervisory Board of Zalando. On Sunday evening, Rubin Ritter, one of Zalando's three co-founders and co-CEO announced his resignation from the company. For background, Zalando is an 11-year-old approximately $20B market cap company, one of the largest e-commerce players for fashion in Europe and is coming off one of its most successful years ever. In a public statement, Rubin said: "I want to devote more time to my growing family. My wife and I have agreed that for the coming years, her professional ambitions should take priority."

I was moved. Somehow, this relatively simple statement felt revolutionary to me. I realized that in all my years in business, I had never heard a male CEO at the height of his power, earnings potential and success step down to prioritize his wife's career - and if this has ever happened, it certainly isn't something I've ever heard announced in a public forum. 

Rubin’s statement connotes a belief set that his marriage is a true partnership – with mutual give and take. For Rubin to have attained the professional success that he has over the past decade, his statement implies that his wife’s career has had to take a backseat. Rationally it’s fair to assume that given the enormity of his responsibility at Zalando, Rubin’s wife likely had to assume more responsibility around management of the home and the family, and therefore had less time to focus on her own career advancement. Often, there is one person in a marriage that is picking up more of the slack at home and making sure everything is humming (even when both individuals are working). It’s common that this role falls on the individual who is making less money. It’s a classic divide and conquer – if one person has higher earning potential, in most cases you are going to optimize around that.

What we know to be true is that even in 2020, the individual who takes a backseat is most commonly the woman. While there are increasingly marriages like my own where my husband has taken leadership over our home life, we are still very much in the minority.  

In some cases, that backseat role is what she chooses and in others, it is chosen for her: women earn less than men, get promoted slower than men, raise capital at far lower numbers than men (meaning that there are far fewer women in Rubin’s position) and for all the other reasons that I don’t feel the need to list because there are just too many of them. That natural division of labor in a marriage also often happens pretty early in our careers, on a relative basis, just by nature of the average age at which people couple up or have their first children which is late 20s/early 30s in the U.S. So basically, whoever is earning more by the age of 32 is going to have his/her own career prioritized.

We often look up to the C-suite or Boardroom and wonder why we haven’t made as much progress over the past few decades adding women into these positions of power. The answer to this is complex. But one element may come from the very natural, often very loving divisions of labor in a family that happened many decades earlier and never changed. They didn’t change because we get into a groove, because it’s hard to re-accelerate one’s career after operating at a slower pace, because flipping the division of labor may mean giving up the salary level that your family is used to and you have a mortgage and bills to pay, because people who accelerate early in their career often have a higher slope to their career and receive even more opportunities for advancement, because child bearing is physical and women have no other option but to take off time when they have babies, because because because.

That is why I was so surprised and so moved by Rubin’s decision. He is literally stepping off a rocket ship early in his life (prior to the age of 40) to give his wife the chance to find her own rocket ship. I hope that Rubin’s actions will feel run-of- the-mill in the not too distant future but for now, I will see this for what it is: a revolutionary action from a business leader who loves his wife and is prioritizing her ambition.