The Wife Drought

by Annabel Crabb

  The other problem I discovered about newspapers is that they actually are quite a bit like children. They need constant attention towards the end of the day. They aren’t always rational. They send you on wild goose chases some days. And – worst of all – they go to bed at the same time as children, with a comparable incidence of tantrums, last-minute projects that urgently need doing, and repeat re-emergences on spurious business right when you think it’s finally all over.

  Amanda Wilson, the first woman to edit the Sydney Morning Herald, told the story – in a 2011 speech – about the time her son, then eight years old, was asked if he would like to be a journalist. ‘No,’ he replied, with feeling. ‘They never see their children.’

  ‘It’s things like that which see many talented women in my profession hit the wall,’ Wilson said. ‘It’s often not a glass ceiling but a pair of pleading eyes.’ While it’s common for male newspaper editors to combine their demanding jobs with raising young families – usually thanks to resourceful spouses – women who become editors tend either not to have children at all, or to wait until their kids are older.

  ‘At one point my boss wanted me to be night editor, a fabulous leadership opportunity,’ recalled Wilson, a single parent. ‘I politely declined on the grounds I would be starting work as my son’s school day ended, and getting home about five hours before he woke up. The only people who’d see him would be his teacher and his child-minder. My boss couldn’t hide his irritation: “When is this child problem going to end?” he asked.’

  Even in my own far less senior job at the Herald, the daily non-sitting-week routine in Sydney was pretty brisk – drive to the childcare centre, find a park, drop off my daughter, get back in the car, drive to work, find a park, work all day, leave at 5 pm when the paper was just getting busy, get to the childcare centre, find a park, pick up my daughter, drive home, cook dinner while rewriting copy or negotiating with subs or monitoring news services to ensure that the prime minister hadn’t quit – GAH, it was ridiculous. Throw another kid in there and I was looking at some kind of breakdown.

  There is a point at which the appeal even of a job you fiercely love can be eaten away to nothing by the layers of debacle and expense that must be undergone simply in order to get there every day.

  As it happened, I was – entirely independently of this impending two-kid-tastrophe – also getting really interested in the new ways the Internet offered of covering politics. When in 2009 the parliamentary rules changed to allow reporters to bring (appropriately silenced) electronic devices into the gallery during Question Time, a whole new world opened up; using Twitter, you could report what was happening in real time. I felt as if we were all on the verge of something exciting, but Fairfax was in the middle of a customary round of board-level skirmish and no one could even agree on who should run the website. Even some of the online people were lukewarm on social media. ‘Twitter’s a fad,’ I remember one of them telling me pityingly at a meeting, as I argued that we should find a way of incorporating Twitter streams directly into our website. ‘And you only have 3000 followers anyway.’ As I write, Twitter is laced through most newspaper websites, and I have as many followers as the Herald sells weekday copies.

  Having another baby was going to force me to change the way I worked. But there were things about the place where I worked that were irking me anyway. When Mark Scott, the ABC’s managing director, suggested that I should come and work for the ABC as an online writer, the idea looked like an obvious circuit-breaker. In the online world, I would be released from the evening deadline. I could still write about politics, but I could do it at any hour of the day or night – as the news happened, not as the trucks warmed up to deliver papers all over the state. Plus, the ABC offered the chance of on-site child care. And all the social media widgets I could handle. It was like winning the lottery.

  So while my initial dilemma was triggered by children, the solution fixed a bunch of other stuff I was worried about too. Thinking about how I was going to manage my job with an extra child ended up forcing me to ask all sorts of questions I probably would otherwise have kept on avoiding: Is this job working out for me? Am I on the same page as my employer? Am I as useful as I could be?

  Here we arrive at the sticky business of accounting for women’s decisions. Proponents of the ‘Mummy Track’ theory would claim me as evidence of the notion that women tend to ‘opt out’ of the workforce, to take the exit ramp from their jobs when they have children. But looking back on it, I don’t see it that way at all. I changed some things about the way I work so that I could raise children without going out of my brain with stress, but essentially I changed jobs because I wanted to.

  Awful things can happen to women who take maternity leave; I’m not for a moment suggesting otherwise. There are plenty of cases in which workers returning from parental leave find that they’ve coincidentally been made redundant, or put in charge of pencil-sharpening.

  Even statutory provisions dictating fair treatment for returning parents can disappear into a perilous grey zone of enforcement. I once sat, with a close friend, through the meetings she had with her employer trying to negotiate the part-time work they were legally obliged to make available to her after her first child. They couldn’t find anyone for a job-share. They didn’t think the days she could work were convenient. In the end, the ultimatum was effectively: work full-time, or don’t work at all. Stricken, my friend left. She lost a job she loved, and the company lost an experienced worker.

  The Sex Discrimination Commissioner’s 2014 inquiry into the experience of people taking parental leave found countless such stories, with about a third of women reporting some kind of discrimination or ill-treatment at work.4 But for many women, maternity leave is an extremely happy time, both for the opportunity to be with their children, and the chance for some clarifying distance from work.

  And what comparable breaks from work do men have? What enforced opportunities do they have to stop doing what they’re doing for a bit, and consider seriously whether they want to start again?

  Well – let’s be honest. In the past century, apart from sudden death or incapacity, the only two mass factors that have interfered with men’s working lives in any statistically significant way have been conscription and redundancy.

  Conscription stopped being an issue in 1972, and the incidence of redundancy is dictated by macroeconomic elements entirely unrelated to the specific needs of people having children. And yet, redundancy – if you trawl the daddy blogs – is the circumstance that crops up again and again as the initiating event in many a successful stay-at-home dad story.

  Redundancy has a few things in common with maternity leave. There’s the dislocation, and the utter shock of one’s new circumstances. There’s the exultant thrill of not knowing or caring what exact time it is, and the creeping new acceptability of tracksuit pants. And the veterans of redundancy are just as apt as childbirth’s adult survivors to emerge, after twenty-two months of whey-faced misery, and declare that ‘it was the best thing that ever happened to me’.

  For men, this is a rather brutal set of circumstances. Having children, and enjoying their company, should – ideally – be a happy thing. Mothers change their work patterns to be with their children and it is viewed as a perfectly normal and organic development. Men have to be ripped from their jobs, or – like Graeme Russell – accidentally find themselves on the scene with some spare time for nappy-changing before they experience the epiphany that is any mother’s for the asking. This does not seem like a fair arrangement.

  The United States gives us all the evidence we need that changes in the behaviour of fathers are driven more by mass economic events than organic human factors. The percentage of American families with a stay-at-home dad has shot to 3.5 per cent in the last decade, according to Pew Research, in a bulletin entitled ‘More Men on the “Daddy Track”’.5

  The financial crisis of 2008 is immediately apprehended as the prime culprit for this viral new outb
reak of Daddism. And, like many catastrophic economic events, it is additionally responsible for a series of related aftershocks, like the noticeable uptick in opinion articles written by stay-at-home dads in the Atlantic Monthly. In fact, the general interest in parenting escalated appreciably in the United States right about the same time as so many recently retrenched men allegedly started doing it. Here’s some evidence, from the New Yorker blog, which announced on 24 March 2014:

  A recent study has shown that if American parents read one more long-form think piece about parenting they will go fucking ape-shit. The study was conducted by Susan Waterson, a professor at the University of Massachusetts and the author of zero books, because, Waterson says, ‘another book at this point would just be cruel’. In the course of seven weeks, Waterson interviewed a hundred and twenty-seven families about their reaction to articles that begin with a wryly affectionate parenting anecdote, segue into a dry cataloguing of sociological research enlivened with alternately sarcastic and tender asides, and end with another wryly affectionate anecdote that aims to add a touch of irony or, failing at that, sentimentality.6

  Let’s keep this in perspective. The boom in American house husbands, according to Pew Research, amounts to a shift since 1979 from 2 per cent of families where the father stays at home, to a current level of 3.5 per cent.7 In an Australian political opinion poll, this would be a change viewed as statistically insignificant. But change it nonetheless is, and it has been duly celebrated, with plenteous magazine covers agape at the Daddy Syndrome, and a timely new NBC comedy series written by Jimmy Fallon, the coolest guy in America, called Guys with Kids.

  The funny thing is, though, that the real Guys with Kids aren’t necessarily out-and-proud, Baby-Björn-wearing home dads who are in it for the thrill of parenting. When stay-at-home dads in the US are asked why they are out of the workforce, only one in five says that it’s to look after his kids. The rest cite illness, difficulty finding work, or disability as the main reason. They might be at home looking after kids, but they were driven there by other circumstances; they needed an additional push. Stay-at-home moms, however, are completely different: 90 per cent of them, when asked, say that they are out of the workforce because they are raising their children.8

  In Australia, exactly the same patterns emerge. There aren’t so many stay-at-home dads, as we know, but only one in five of them – when asked – ticked the box saying he was home by preference to look after children. Mothers, again, saw things differently: four out of five declared that they were at home because of the kids.9

  This tells us something rather profound about the barriers that stand between men and their children. Hardly any men take up the job of primary caregiver in the home anyway, and of the small band who do, four out of five had another formal reason for being there. Children alone, in other words, are not a sufficient driver to get men out of the workplace; you need something else, be it redundancy or misadventure, to actually yank them out the door.

  Like all forms of human behaviour, this one is a sinewy knot of many factors.

  But men do want more flexibility at work than they are presently getting. Some research done in 2012 by the Diversity Council established that 79 per cent of young fathers, for instance, would like to try a compressed work week. But only 24 per cent of them actually did. As we know, new fathers increase their work hours by four hours a week, rather than reducing them. Fifty-six per cent of young fathers, meanwhile, said they would like to work part of their regular hours at home, but only 13 per cent of them actually did.10

  Even those for whom statistics are a confounding language could spot quite a gap there between the number of men who want to change the way they work, and the number of men who change the way they work. This creates four possibilities.

  Possibility One is that they are not telling the truth, and are worried that their wives are listening in when the wonk from the Diversity Council calls them at home after dinner. ‘Hello? Yes, I would VERY MUCH LIKE to spend more time with my children. I am UNHAPPY leaving them every morning for my nice quiet office. I would very much like to WORK FROM HOME, where I can be closer to their petty disagreements and irritating honky toy things. THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME!’

  Possibility Two is that men have an unfounded fear that asking for flexibility might cause them to be thought less ambitious, successful or suitable for promotion. Possibility Three – closely related to Possibility Two – is that men have a well-founded fear that asking for flexibility might cause them to be thought less ambitious, successful or suitable for promotion.

  Possibility Four is that they genuinely want to work more flexibly, and would be prepared to wear the opprobrium at work should any arise, but cannot afford to take the financial hit. This is the point at which the wife drought’s vicious circle completes itself. Women earn less over their lifetimes because they either leave the workforce to look after children, or are silently marked down on the expectation that they will do so. Fathers are paid more, partly because they are thought less likely to leave the workforce. As a result of being paid more, they are indeed less likely to leave the workforce, and thus continue to be paid more than their wives, who are paid less because they are thought more likely to leave the workforce, and – seeing as they’re being paid less already – frequently do just that.

  Let’s look at Possibility One first. As we know from earlier chapters, human beings are fabulously complex creatures and it is quite easy for us to be passionately convinced that we believe one thing, even when everything we do and say suggests the opposite. And there is quite a bit of pressure on men to take an interest in their children; it’s not just mothers who have had their KPIs remorselessly jacked up by the Intensive Parenting movement, after all. There are all sorts of reasons, in other words, why a man might declare an aspiration to spend more time with his beloved progeny, while secretly thanking God that circumstances do not technically require him to.

  ‘A house with a newborn in it is a hellish place to be,’ remarks the writer John Birmingham, who – having worked from home for much of his career, has found himself unavoidably on-scene for all the seamier aspects of his two children’s early lives. ‘If you can go to your office, where everything runs smoothly and everything is quiet and you might even be able to have a sleep – why wouldn’t you?

  ‘It’s such a shameful thing to admit, so actually finding people to ’fess up to it is probably pretty hard work.’

  Let’s give men the benefit of the doubt, though, and work with possibilities Two through Four, which assume that when they say they would like to be able to change their work hours, they mean it. Why don’t they ask? After all, every available piece of workplace-related behavioural psychology research indicates that men have less trouble than women in asking for promotions, pay rises, corner offices, special titles; why should it be any different for parental leave?

  The difference is that all those things are about asking for more: more money, more status, more responsibility. Asking for less is a completely different matter, and it’s completely out of whack with what we expect of men at work. Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg compared the modern career to a marathon, in which spectators urge male runners to press on (‘Lookin’ strong! On your way!’) but shout encouragement of a different kind to women (‘You know you don’t have to do this! Good start – but you probably won’t want to finish!’).11

  The truth is that people find it easier to ask for things that they are expected to ask for. We expect that women will ask for flexible work hours, or to come back to work part-time after having a baby. We expect that, because most of the time that’s what happens. We don’t expect men to ask. And sure enough, they don’t. Sandberg’s point is that women aren’t encouraged to stay in the race. But the problem for men is that nobody teaches them how to stop.

  The fact that we don’t expect men to ask for less work is telegraphed both explicitly and implicitly at every level of public and private life. Prime Minister Tony
Abbott’s avowal, when he took office, of his determination to help ‘women struggling to combine career and family’, had a headline message: helping women. But the underlying message – unintentional, almost certainly – pulsed out like a beacon: this is a problem that women face. It’s not a problem that men face. And for men paddling against the tide of this great and largely unspoken national expectation, that might have proved a dispiriting moment.

  Flexible work schemes are the sexual harassment policies of the twenty-first century – it seems every large company is scrambling to get one. There are a couple of reasons for the craze. One is that ever since companies started calculating what it was costing them to train women to a certain level and then make it impossible for them to come back to work after having children, there’s been a lot more enthusiasm for finding ways to keep those women on. Another is that saving money on expensive work space, and having an employee use their own office or kitchen table at home instead, is what we in the human resource management field call a no-brainer.

  Moreover, there is strong evidence that if you allow employees to work flexibly, you can squeeze a good deal more work out of them, while also making them feel like you might be doing them a favour by allowing them to work in their jarmies every now and again, which does – admit it! – carry with it a slight, Hefneresque thrill of privilege.