When the leave was over, he didn’t want to go back to his 60-hour weeks, but he didn’t want to become a stay-at-home parent either. “The work is very important,” he says. With a baby at home, he learned that sometimes he couldn’t “wait to get back to work because there’s sanity. It can be an oasis.”

The couple hired a nanny, and Bill switched jobs a few times  to a clerkship for a judge, to a solo practice, to a smaller firm  looking for the right fit. Alexandra rose through the ranks at her company, and after their second son was born in 2000, she continued working four days a week. Her schedule  every Friday off, spent with the children  appealed to Bill, who took a job in the compliance department of his wife’s employer, though it would be a while before he would get up the nerve to ask for a four-day week too.

In 2004, when Jo and Tim’s son was born, Alexandra was pregnant for the third time (she would have another boy), and Bill came across a ThirdPath conference about “Creating Work-Life Balance in the Law.” That was the first he knew that what he was trying to fashion had a name. Like Jo and Tim, he was reassured and inspired by DeGroot’s orderly charts, and while he did not go as far as making his own, he did adopt her worldview.

Jo and Tim did draft a chart. After her three-month maternity leave, their schedule worked like this, as Tim explains: “I would get up extra early and head to work, and Jo would be home until later in the morning and then take him to day care. She would leave work again at lunch for an hour to nurse him. I would take half a lunch and leave work by 2:30 or 3, pick Seth up and take him home. Jo would stay at work until 6.”

They agreed to share chores at home too, but their varying definitions of “done” soon made things unequal. “He would do the laundry,” Jo says, “but he was so slow about it that I took it back. His level of alertness to mess is quite different than mine. I see dirt two or three days before he does.” So she took back a lot of the cleaning too.

Their work-home time was evenly divided for about a year, and then in the summer of 2005, their daughter, Kate, was born. Jo tried to envision a schedule that would account for the demands of two children under the age of 2. “I realized what it would take to get all of us out of the house by a certain time in order for us to keep the life we had . . . ,” she says, trailing off. She calculated that her take-home salary, which was substantially lower than her husband’s, would barely pay for child care. She took a hard look at the satisfaction she got from her office job, which was nil compared with the joy she had found while planting crops in Chad. “If I could get a job that would pay me $50,000 a year, that would rival or compete with Tim’s . . . ,” she says, letting that thought trail off as well.

Jo would not disagree with Deutch’s point that she had a role in creating that inequity  choosing to major in international rural development, with little practical career application, while her husband obtained two master’s degrees, one in counseling and the other in college student personnel, with better job potential. Even marrying a man who was ahead of her on the career ladder, and therefore likely to remain ahead of her, was a choice. But there comes a point where the origin of the cards you hold becomes irrelevant, and you have to play the hand you are dealt.