Ms. Black and others say that is the real gift of a stay-at-home spouse: avoiding domestic distractions and competing better against other bankers, many of them men with stay-at-home wives.

If Ms. Black gets a call on Tuesday afternoon asking her to attend an out-of-town dinner the next night, she can go. Ms. Jan de Beur took two trips a week on average last spring. Candida P. Wolff, the head of global government affairs for Citigroup, often travels about one and a half weeks each month.

Being the breadwinner often means being taken more seriously in the workplace, they have learned. When one former banker was interviewing at a private equity firm, she said her prospective employers wanted to know what her husband did and seemed pleased that he had a low-paying but flexible job and handled more parenting duties. It dawned on her that the presumption men had often benefited from — that they would not be diverted by household demands — was finally applying to her too.

On the home front, the women cast the deciding votes on major financial decisions. “It’s not like when you and I were growing up and Dad made all the decisions, but I still control the purse strings,” Ms. Black said.

At Wells Fargo’s modernist tower on Park Avenue, Ms. Schumaker-Krieg, the global head of research, economics and strategy for the bank, is making new recommendations on how to retain and advance female employees. She has spent decades persuading women on her team not to quit, even when they are put on bed rest during pregnancy or give birth to a child with special needs. And she would like others in the industry to follow suit.

She acknowledges that part of the problem is the fundamental nature of the business: the ceaseless race to score the big deals and anticipate market moves. Soon she will complete year-end tallies, ranking the research analysts, including Ms. Black and Ms. Jan de Beur, against their competitors and each other.

Some of the women with stay-at-home husbands are her top performers. When she calls those men “the wind beneath our wings,” she sounds both kind and calculating; the more domestic responsibility the men are willing to assume, the more their wives can help the bank make money.

“It’s easy to slide into irrelevance by backing off just a little,” she warned.