Inside the gilded walls of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, life for the Glam SAHMs is probably much more curious than we hoi polloi could ever imagine.

Glam SAHMs, according to Wednesday Martin of the New York Times, stands for “glamorous stay-at-home-moms.” They are a group of 30-somethings, educated at the finest institutions, married into Wall Street riches and in the midst of raising 3.5 kids.

In many ways, these ladies aren’t so different from the ones you might come across in your typical neighborhood park wiping drool off their Lululemons or helping kids poke straws through Capri Suns. But if one were to draw a Venn diagram of typical moms and the-north-of-63rd-but-south-of-94th variety, there would be an item glaringly missing from the overlap: wife bonuses.

Martin describes being “thunderstruck” when she heard about one woman waiting for her “year-end” so she could sponsor a pricey table at an event. Another held off on a shopping spree until she earned her bonus. Apparently, the Times concludes, this is common practice in these parts.

“A wife bonus, I was told, might be hammered out in a pre-nup or post-nup, and distributed on the basis of not only how well her husband’s fund had done but her own performance — how well she managed the home budget, whether the kids got into a ‘good’ school — the same way their husbands were rewarded at investment banks.”

And for the ladies not compensated for their services?

“Women who didn’t get them joked about possible sexual performance metrics,” Martin writes. “The wives of the masters of the universe, I learned, are a lot like mistresses—dependent and comparatively disempowered.” Read the full story.