Perhaps, you might think, the figures in that study are a phenomenon driven by experience in other countries. Perhaps that imbalance is an oddity experienced at the very top of the executive tree, where men earn squillions and their wives don’t need to work.
Actually, the vital statistics of those executives aren’t terribly different from what happens in the lives of average Australian working families.
Let’s imagine that you hold a party and invite 100 ‘average dads’ – full-time working men who have children and a female wife or partner. If you went around the room and asked each of them what their wife does, only twenty-four of them would reply that she has a full-time job. The other seventy-six would tell you that their wife works part-time, or not at all.25 If you were feeling especially nosy and you followed up by asking who was primarily responsible for child care and housework in their home, you would find that an overwhelming majority of them would say: ‘She is.’
However, if you went to a party of full-time working mothers, you would get almost an opposite result – eighty-six of them would tell you that their husbands also worked full-time. Not that they would probably make it to the party anyway.
For all that we hear about the modernisation of Australian families, and as much as we enjoy the show House Husbands, the truth is that Australia remains unusually adherent to the male-breadwinner model. What proportion of nuclear families has a dad who works full-time, and a mum who doesn’t? Sixty per cent. What proportion has a mum who works full-time, with a male ‘wife’? Three per cent.
When they get their first jobs, young men and women are on an equal footing, or as close to it as they’ll ever be; single, unencumbered, competitive. This equality of circumstance persists into the early years of employment. And indeed, the gender pay gap is barely observable at all if you look at Generation Y women only.26
But the point at which people start having babies is when the wife drought really hits, and where the Stupid Curve begins. Women who have taken a career break to look after children, in many cases acting rationally because they earn less than their husbands, earn even less when they return to work on a part-time basis or in a lower-status job with more flexibility. They are less competitive in the workplace. Their husbands, however, fuelled by the invisible power-pellet that is a wife, become more competitive.
These patterns in turn generate more patterns. Having a stay-at-home wife makes life easier for a male executive or leader – obviously. It makes his success more likely, in my view. But having a traditional domestic arrangement may also subtly influence the decisions he makes within his organisation.
American researchers in 2012 conducted a study of 232 male managers.27 All of them worked in universities, and all of them were married; some with ‘traditional’ domestic arrangements (read: a ‘wife’), and some with ‘modern’ arrangements. The participants were asked to assume the identity of an executive called Drew Anderson, chief financial officer of a software company called Infomitex. An opportunity had come up at the company’s prestigious MBA programme, and the CEO was on the hunt for internal candidates. Could Drew take a look at this CV and give an opinion? If Drew recommended a candidate who turned out to be terrific, it would mean significant brownie points, participants were told. They were then handed a CV belonging to a promising-looking candidate. For half the participants, that candidate was called Diane Blake. For the other half, he was called David Blake, but in each case the qualifications and work history were exactly the same. The researchers found that men in ‘traditional’ marriages gave ‘significantly poorer’ evaluations of the female candidate compared to the male candidate.
Does this demonstrate that men are awful? Well, I guess in the traditional framework for the workplace gender debate – yes, it does. But I think what it probably demonstrates is that people are terminally, irrevocably, unavoidably changed and moulded by the way they live, the way they were brought up, and what they see as the normal or preferable way of doing things.
Lots of things change the way men think, even when they are otherwise embedded in fairly conservative ideas about how things work. Kate Morgan, a Sydney barrister who is one of only three women in her chambers, told me that she was often shocked to find the most conservative views on women and work among male colleagues of her own generation, the majority of whom had stay-at-home wives.
Morgan and her husband, fellow barrister Richard McHugh, both come from families in which mothers had both children and big jobs. His mother is Jeannette McHugh, the first New South Wales woman elected to federal Parliament. Kate’s mother was the late Dr Philomena McGrath, a leading Australian anatomy expert and mother of eight. For Morgan – who navigates the demands of family through the famously demanding environment of life as a barrister – reactions from male colleagues tend to vary with their age.
‘Junior male colleagues without children, and with partners or wives in a similar position to them – lawyers, say, or doctors – tend to be very supportive, and are routinely shocked by structural discrimination within the law, or at the Bar,’ she says.
‘But the generation above them – men my age – are very likely to have a family dynamic where their wives have “elected” to take a back seat. When you’re a barrister, your income corresponds directly to the number of hours you work, so even if the wife’s a doctor or lawyer, it makes more sense for her to be at home.
‘But when these guys go to work, they run into women who are exactly like their wives – intelligent, well-educated – but who are still working. And it’s amazing how often they’ll make assumptions about their female colleagues based on what their own wives have done. When choosing junior counsel in a large or very urgent case that’s going to involve long hours or weekend work, they’ll never choose or recommend a mother because – of course – she would rather be with her children and do more “manageable” (read: less prestigious and less well-paid) work. Or when voting for a new barrister to join the floor, and a mother is up for consideration, they might make comments like “What if she wants to work part-time?” Which means, “Of course, she would prefer to be with her children, as our wives do.”’
Older men, however, have often moderated their views, says Morgan.
‘The last generation has grown up and is not threatened by the comparison between their family’s own choices and instead is viewing the workplace from the perspective of their grown daughters. Those daughters, with potentially thirteen years of private school and up to six years of university, should have the world at their feet. Instead, this generation sees and hears the complaints of the current generation of working mothers and recognises that their intelligent, well-educated daughter will also be faced with a workplace that still places limits on their capacity and their advancement.’
This phenomenon is not Kate’s imagination. The birth of daughters makes male executives more generous towards female employees, found another American study in 2012.28 And the Yale economist Ebonya Washington, in a rather epic 2008 analysis of the US House of Representatives, found that every daughter born to a US Congressman made him 25 per cent more likely to vote progressively on women’s issues.29
This clears the way for some fairly blue-sky thinking about how you might improve the legislative environment for women by means of a strategic air-drop of female infants around Canberra. But, mainly, it reinforces my view that our discussion of what happens to women at work can never really make sense until it stretches well beyond work and encompasses what the woman is doing when she gets home from work, and – conversely – what attitudes might subtly be reinforced in a man who has the luxury of a wife.
The wife drought both underpins and perpetuates all the other elements that influence women’s experience in the workplace. There are plenty of exceptions – redemptive male bosses, women who succeed – but the tendency of women to take on responsibility for domestic work, and the tendency of men not to, is the great rhythm of the Australian workplace that escapes the naked eye. Men get wives
, and women don’t.
2
LOOKING AT THINGS THE WRONG WAY UP
Now, this whole state of affairs is annoying, mostly if you’re a woman. I mean, if you’re interested in having a career, it would be nice to think you had the same chances of success and fulfilment as the person next to you, regardless of their possession or otherwise of certain primary sexual characteristics. But that’s not how it works.
Feeling bad, or sad, or even angry about women getting a rough trot in the workplace seems a natural sort of response; it’s what feminists have been trained for. And the remedy for decades now has been to suggest all sorts of devices to help women prosper in the workplace. Quotas. Mentoring systems. Book clubs. Ladies-only poker nights. Networking sessions. Interesting speakers.
To some extent, this has been a success. More women are now in work than were working fifty years ago. We’ve had a female prime minister, a female governor-general, and a handful of female CEOs in the ASX200.
On the other hand, it’s also bred a generation of half-crazed ‘superwomen’, for whom real incursions into the ‘male’ world of work have not included – to any commensurate degree – a corresponding retreat from the ‘female’ world of work in the home; they just do both.
For many modern mothers, progress at work means the privilege of working herself into the ground in two places rather than one. According to the Australian Work and Life Index, a growing majority of working women with children now report that they ‘often or always’ feel stressed and pushed for time.1
It might seem convenient to try and jam this situation into the customary frame of gender debate. Awful men, reaping the benefits of having hard-working wives, shamelessly enjoying an economic leg-up over the rest of us. Hopeless women dashing about trying to make things work in a system that is spring-loaded to drive them slowly berserk, bashing their heads against the glass ceiling in a daze of guilt and anxiety, and still ending up with crappy superannuation.
But what if we are looking at things the wrong way up? What if the structural problem here is not just how to get women into the workplace, but how to get men out of it? All this time, we’ve been trying to win equality by eliminating the disadvantages women incur when they take time out to have children. But what if we just accepted that people might well be disadvantaged when they take time out of work, and concentrated instead on spreading the responsibility around?
We pay so much attention to the barriers that face women trying to break in to the workplace, and the glass ceiling that prevents them from climbing to the top.
But what about the barriers that make it hard for men to get out of the workplace? What about the glass fire escapes?
Forget everything for a minute; forget the history, forget the politics, forget the ancient resentments and hurts and the millions of women who have ever started on a career and felt it didn’t go where they thought it could have. Forget the money. Forget that long, plaque-like accumulation of disadvantage. Forget – and this is a big ask, in any workplace, for anyone – the dreadful canker of resentment that grows among any class of people who look at another class of people and suspect that those people get an easier ride. Just for a minute, forget all that.
And look at it the other way up, instead.
Getting together and having babies is still something that a large proportion of working Australians do. And when that happens, 76 per cent of working mothers will take the opportunity to change their working lives in some way: to work part-time, to negotiate flexible work hours, to work at home, or undertake shift work of some kind. That’s three-quarters of working mothers with children aged eleven and younger, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.2
But for most fathers, it doesn’t function that way at all. Our system encourages them to keep on working as though nothing has changed. Of working fathers with a child aged eleven or under, only one in three change their working pattern in any way at all, and the vast majority of those are talking about flexi-time, not about working part-time or making significant adjustments of the kind women routinely make. In fact, fathers – on average – will slightly increase their working hours by four hours a week with the birth of a first child.3
Why is this? Isn’t it a bit outrageous? Why should we so readily agree for men to be painted out of the picture? Having a child is a life-changing experience, or so a convincing majority of parenting blogs consistently maintain. So why does our system pretend that parenthood only changes women’s lives?
In the great and ongoing wing-ding about gender and work, why do we spend so much time arguing about what women lose at work, and hardly ever about what men lose at home? Is it because what men lose at home is so banal that we don’t assign it a value? And if so, isn’t that rather an insult to the great work of raising children?
If we value work at home then we should value it properly, and that means not just lamenting that women don’t get paid for it, but also that our system doesn’t really encourage men to do it.
Men miss out on the vertiginous thrill of losing a significant per cent of your income, and of spending a few years when people at barbecues look blankly at you after you answer the ‘And what do you do?’ question. And maybe that doesn’t smart too much, all things considered.
But there is a whole lot of stuff they do miss out on which is pretty cool. Hanging out with their children, for instance. Viewed as an economic equation, stepping back from work to have a family is an unambiguously terrible option. There really isn’t a faster way to earn permanent devaluation in the workplace than sloping off for a few years to spend time with the under-threes.
Viewed the other way up, though – the way that assumes that there’s more to life than work, and that having a good relationship with your children is valuable – it’s not a bad investment. Yet we live in a system that consistently, in one way or other, discourages men from even attempting to make that investment.
Men miss out – in disproportionate numbers – on the opportunity to work flexibly, and to bend the way they work in order to accommodate the other things going on in their lives. Now, I’m not arguing that mothers always get the right to work flexibly, or even that it works out to be all sunbeams and fairy dust when they do. But the expectation that a woman will probably be looking to work a bit differently after she has a kid is sort of scorched into our national employment model – it’s why women of a certain age get funny looks at promotion time. But we don’t expect men to work differently after they have kids. And even though there is legislation enshrining the right to ask for flexibility, far fewer men use it; they don’t expect that they will change their work patterns, and often neither do their families. And they know their employers don’t really expect them to either.
Graeme Russell is a fathering expert. He’s one of Australia’s best-known fathering experts, in fact, and something of an international authority, and if you haven’t heard of him, it’s not because of any shortfall of expertise on his part but because, in this country, fathering experts don’t tend to get their own TV shows.
Russell wasn’t originally trained as a fathering expert, either; he made the career change after becoming a hands-on parent, quite by accident, in the 1970s. ‘My first degree was in pure mathematics,’ he says. ‘It had nothing to do with families.’ But Russell then started a PhD in experimental psychology, and was – by chance – spending a lot of time at home writing when he and his wife, Susan, had their first child. ‘Did I want to be a dad? Yeah, I suppose, in that “I’ll definitely do that at some point” way,’ he says. ‘But what happened to me was I had that experience, of my first child coming home from hospital, and being around, and being actively involved.’ He laughs. ‘We were both sort of struggling with it all and I thought, shit, I sort of thought Susan would know a bit more about all of this. But she didn’t know anything more than I did. So we did it together. And being around, and developing those habits is important … I found that as I got involved, I could see the value of it, an
d I enjoyed it.’
Russell’s opportunity to be involved with his baby straight-up, rather than spending the days away at an office, didn’t just make him a more involved father – it made him change his line of work. ‘Taking time out of the workforce and being involved in something else can have an enormous positive impact,’ he observes.
Leaving work can be quite a useful thing to do. If you’re in a job that’s annoying you, human nature dictates that the most normal response is to keep doing the job, while whingeing about the stuff you don’t like. Maybe you don’t dislike that job enough to actually quit it, and lose the income and job security. In that case, whining in private seems a satisfying and low-cost alternative.
It’s hard to be completely objective about a job when you are still turning up to it every day. When you have a break from it – especially one occasioned by independently occurring circumstances, like parental leave or long-service leave (that increasingly antiquated phenomenon) – you have an opportunity to ask yourself whether you really want to stick around.
Blessed with the clarifying distance of temporary absence, some women find that they want to do something else. Not all of them, by any means – enough of them want to come back, and find it difficult for other reasons, for me not to insult them here by pretending they opted out – but some of them do. They might decide they want to be with the kids full-time. Or that they want to go back to study. Or that they want an entirely different career, or a slightly different one, or to invent a revolutionary storage bag for LEGO pieces.
Family circumstances might make one job unworkable, but lead you to another job you love. I left newspapers in 2009 when – pregnant with my second child – I realised I wasn’t going to be able to pull off certain aspects of the job I had been doing. I’d been commuting from Sydney to Canberra during parliamentary sitting weeks to write political sketches for the Sydney Morning Herald, often driving there for the week and taking my small daughter along. We had an au pair at the time who was happy to explore Canberra during the day with her, and it worked pretty well, but things were probably going to tip over into unfeasibility once there was a second squealer involved. Moving to Canberra wasn’t an option because of my partner’s job. My employer had been very generous and flexible, agreeing – for instance – that I could stay in a flat rather than a hotel room when I went to Canberra, but whichever way I looked at the situation, the prospect of keeping it up with two small children made me feel sort of faint.
The Wife Drought Page 5
