The Wife Drought

by Annabel Crabb

  Which is why you don’t see the Economist, say, publishing a cheeky weekly column called ‘Fragrantly Female’, in which dopey women executives are fondly documented.

  Imagine it: ‘FF – newly appointed chief financial officer – appeared at a board meeting with her CEO to provide a detailed briefing on the company’s expansion plans. She was tapping away at her laptop, but exclaimed “YES!” when the CEO mentioned that some redundancies would probably be a part of the company’s five-year plan. The chairman turned to her, puzzled. “Do you have something to say, Miss Brown?” FF blushed. “Sorry,” she mumbled. “I just won this great handbag on eBay!”’ John Topjob, Hunters Hill.

  And you don’t see movies whose central gag is a woman going to work. This is partly because we actually don’t see women in the workforce as unusual any more. Women have infiltrated the workplace to a much greater extent. There may be a great howling dearth of women near the top of the heap, but down around middle-management level there are plenty of women, so most workplaces are accustomed to having ladies around. Women at work, it’s now finally fair to say, are not remarkable. But a man turning up to a mothers’ group is still remarkable, and consequently a viable subject for situation comedy.

  Just incidentally, movies continue to present a skewed version not only of what women do but also of how many of us tend to be around the place as a general matter of course. Researchers at the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media (yes, I know, but this is interesting, I promise) watched 129 top-grossing family movies released between 2006 and 2011, and found that women only had 28.3 per cent of speaking roles. The researchers also totted up the percentage of women who had powerful or significant screen jobs, and found that they constituted only 3.4 per cent of screen CEOs, 4.5 per cent of high-level screen politicians, and 21.9 per cent of screen doctors. They constituted zero per cent of investors and developers.3

  Movies are commercial undertakings, with a rock-solid financial incentive to appeal to the viewing audience’s existing prejudices rather than shaking them up. Poking fun at someone doing something different isn’t just safe; it’s also more likely to be profitable.

  The other reason it’s still perfectly acceptable for women to disparage men’s domestic competence is because the domestic sphere is gloriously unregulated. Extensive sex discrimination laws make it illegal to express – in the workplace – the view that chicks are hopeless. Workplaces are regulated; anyone circulating a series of ribald tales of serial female incompetence at work can look forward to a lengthy and potentially quite upsetting encounter with the relevant workplace tribunal.

  Homes, though, are a free-speech stomping ground, which means that any woman can whine at length about how bad men as a general class are at picking up dirty laundry, replacing caps on toothpaste tubes, or organising children for school, without feeling that they are committing any sort of offence against the broad notion of gender equality.

  My panic-cooking to compensate for an imminent absence, with its casual implied assumption that my partner is a simpleton who cannot make a Vegemite sandwich unsupervised, is exactly the sort of high-handed and patronising conduct that would annoy a woman at work, were all the circumstances reversed. I imagine myself obliged to mount a defence before the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Tribunal.

  ‘Your Honour, I do accept that in making these meals ahead, I may have created a circumstance from which the complainant may have inferred I thought him incompetent. On reflection, I also understand that my fried rice – well-intentioned as it was – might have interfered with any independently formulated plans the complainant may himself have made, including but not limited to pasta carbonara, which the kids really like. But in my defence, I always do the lunches. And I know how annoying it is to have three starving kids milling about and whining while you’re trying to cook dinner from scratch. Your Honour: I meant well.’

  Is there something else involved, though? Is there a Meisenbachian hidden bid for power in my meal prep? I think it’s a bit more complicated than that. If I’m honest with myself, I think the fuss I make about going away (making a footy-team-sized lasagne, finding presents for the kids for my return, and so on) is partly to create the plausible illusion that my absence is an unusual event – a blip in what is otherwise a blameless and sustained maternal presence. This is, of course, ridiculous; I go away overnight for work at least once a month, and everybody copes. But I would rather flap about in an overstressed and rather inaccurate demonstration that I do it all than simply vacate the field to someone else who is actually capable of replacing me. At one level I don’t want to be replaced, because I don’t want anybody else to be as good at it as I am. Also, I feel guilty about leaving. And staying up until 1 am to cook meals when I’ve got to be on a 7 am flight feels like appropriate penance.

  This is what ‘Mum moments’ tend to be – moments of supercharged and twanging overcompetence, in which the heroine dashes about, rescheduling appointments with one hand and steering a toddler bike with the other, offsetting the resultant hike in blood pressure with the soothing balm of martyrdom. Look how much I got done at once. I must be doing something right.

  I was once asked to speak in a debate about workplace flexibility and whether it was or wasn’t the key to equality. It’s a subject I’m very interested in, obviously, so I was looking forward to it.

  By the time the actual date for the debate rolled around, though, I was in serious overload. I had a standard busy work week, plus a nasty cluster of speeches I had foolishly agreed to deliver, and a houseful of visitors in town for my brother-in-law’s birthday, for which I had agreed to bake a birthday cake. It was also my daughter’s birthday. So when I sat down to write a speech about work–life balance the night before the debate, I found myself in such a state of exhaustion that I burst into tears.

  In the end, I went to the debate and just told the story of my stupid week, including the moment at the end of it where assembling some thoughts on flexible working turned out to be the task that tipped me over into panic attack.

  Afterwards, I fell into conversation with Marian Baird, who is one of Australia’s pre-eminent experts in the area of women and work; a woman of such pulsating intelligence that I always feel a little under-researched when I am around her. Compulsively, I apologised for backloading my contribution to the debate with tales of ‘my own domestic incompetence’. She looked at me evenly. ‘Tales of competence, don’t you mean?’

  And she was quite right, of course. I had thought I was being self-deprecating. But actually, viewed in retrospect, without the mitigating context of panic, I see that what I was actually doing in that speech was boasting. Check out how amazing I am. I can do all this stuff at once. And still turn up with my hair brushed.

  I also met Lisa Annese that night – she is the possessor of the best mum moment I have ever come across, bar none. Lisa is the CEO of the Diversity Council Australia. She came back to work for the organisation when – not long after the birth of her third child – she was promoted.

  Shortly after starting her new job, Lisa was required to be on a 5.30 am conference call with experts based in New York, Singapore and Utah. It was all going swimmingly until she heard – elsewhere in the house – a commotion of some kind break out. Kids shrieking, joined swiftly by the frenzied yapping of the family dog. Lisa manipulated the phone’s mute button strategically, so as to minimise the audibility to her international colleagues of this mounting, and at this stage unclassified, family crisis. The shrieking escalated. It was coming in waves now. Suddenly, the dog plunged into Lisa’s office, barking hysterically. Diving under the desk, it became entangled in the nest of cords and leads there and, despite Lisa’s best efforts with the mute button, the sounds of the hysterical chihuahua began to bleed across into the transatlantic calm of the teleconference.

  Then the children started coming in. At first, they tried – in the face of stern shushing from their mother – to express in rudimentary sign language what was going
on outside. Then they came back with bits of paper on which explanatory messages had been hastily scrawled in a juvenile hand. Increasingly concerned for her international credibility, Lisa waved them away. Finally, Lisa’s second daughter re-entered, carrying the maimed remains of a baby guinea pig. It turns out one of the family’s guinea pigs had been – unbeknownst to all – pregnant. The delivery of the babies had been the first source of excitement outside; the next was the father’s surprise decision to celebrate the event by partially eating one of the babies. Lisa silently absorbed this development, while continuing to be a full participant in the business of the meeting.

  A final delegation of children delivered a written ultimatum about five minutes later: ‘We’ve named the baby Coconut, and we’re having the funeral NOW.’

  ‘I got through the meeting,’ Lisa recalls. ‘I have no idea what they thought of me.’

  Now, she says, she has learned to stop worrying about her private life bleeding into her work life. ‘I’m not apologetic about anything any more. If I’m in a doctor’s surgery with my kid, taking the call, I’ll say where I am. I find once you stop apologising, people stop expecting you to apologise.’

  Compartmentalising work and family responsibilities so as to display a flawless face of competence to both worlds is a common female tactic. Lisa recalls a fellow executive – also a mother – telling her: ‘When I go and pick my kids up from school, I always walk out with a briefcase so it looks like I’m going to a meeting.’

  But what does this tactic achieve? Usually, the privilege of going crazy in the echoing privacy of your own skull, with no one else but you understanding exactly how hard you’re actually working.

  In October 2013, I filled in for Leigh Sales for a few weeks as host of 7.30. One of the weeks was a special kind of hell; I flew with the children to Adelaide at the weekend so they could hang out with their grandparents while I spoke at my old school, did three sessions at the Adelaide Festival of Ideas, then on Sunday my mother and I and the baby drove to Port Pirie – shrieking with laughter at my idiocy in having got myself into this mess – for a speech to the SA Rural Women’s Gathering, before packing everyone up and heading back to Sydney for another week of 7.30. I had agreed months earlier to speak at a dinner for the Sydney University Debating Union, so Tuesday found me cursingly, at 8 pm, after a gruelling day and a live interview with the treasurer, climbing into a frock and a cab, and heading for the university.

  The event was in full swing when I got there; beautifully dressed young men and women tossing aphorisms at each other. I accepted a glass of champagne and tried to perk up, while making conversation with a charming young man. I explained why I was late: work, too many children, and so on. ‘You must be busy!’ he chirped. ‘Still – I guess you can’t be that busy, if you’ve got time to come and speak to us!’

  I felt a bit sick when he said that. But it was a useful thing to hear. It made me realise that my obsession with super-competency – my determination not to break engagements and to simply absorb pressure indefinitely – was nobody’s fault but my own. Who could I blame for this beside myself? Whose fault was it that I was entering my sixteenth waking hour for the day doing a favour for a bunch of people to whom I owed absolutely nothing? Why would this kid ever realise that getting here nearly broke me? Why should he? What was I expecting? A tiara? Given that I had bent over backwards to make the whole thing look easy, why should I feel aggrieved that someone took me at my word?

  The smiling face of female super-competence is an advertising regular. The Harpic ad campaign for its ‘Two-In-One’ toilet freshener tablets opens with the mother of a newborn receiving a surprise visit from a swarm of buddies. ‘Can I use your loo?’ one of them asks. The woman’s face creases in horror. What if it’s not clean? But then, her brow clears. Of course! Thank the baby Jesus, she has had the foresight to hook a gaudily coloured compacted brick of baking soda and overpowering lavender-fragrance over the ceramic lip of her dunny, so she’s totally in the clear. Whew! ‘What does your loo say about you?’ inquires the ad cheekily, as a closer.

  One would hope the most a loo would say about a person is that that person has mastered peristalsis. But this is the home, where key performance indicators are not listed in the employment contract. And nature abhors a vacuum.

  In November 2012, British supermarket chain Asda broadcast a commercial in which a smiling blonde super-mum prepares for her family Christmas. Against an upbeat soundtrack, the camera tracks her as she buys a tree, strings lights, wraps awkwardly shaped presents, bastes a turkey, peels potatoes, chocks a wobbly table up with books, makes beds, installs festive napery, is roused at dawn by squealing children, prepares lunch single-handedly, allocates herself the footstool at the corner of the table when the chairs run out, then concludes as she stands happily, at the end of the day, surveying a silver paper-strewn lounge room in which a dozing mass of humanity satedly watches TV, and smiles. ‘It doesn’t just happen by magic!’ advises the voiceover. ‘Behind every great Christmas, there’s Mum. And behind Mum, there’s Asda.’

  After a number of complaints, Asda issued a partial apology in which it acknowledged some people were upset by the stereotyping in the ad, but insisted they had had a lot of positive feedback.

  ‘We do two things to women in advertising,’ says advertising creative director Dee Madigan. ‘We play on their insecurity about their looks, and we play on their guilt about their children; if you love your children, you’ll keep them safe from germs with this new disposable wipe.’

  Among men, though, the dad bungler is as common in advertising as he is in the movies. Kia’s 2010 ad for its Sportage wagon features a tracksuited dad cruising the streets miming to a Grandmaster Flash song. His reverie intensifies as members of the actual band materialise and rap along with him, and by the time he eases the car into a suburban driveway, he’s developed a serious White Man Overbite. At this point, his wife, a drained-looking blonde woman holding a garden hose, with which she is seemingly using her last drops of human optimism to water some shrubs, asks him unsmilingly, ‘Did you get the nappies?’ He grimaces: ‘Ah. The nappies!’

  Men and nappies. In the advertising world, the nappy is a vile nemesis to modern man. It is Apollo Creed to his Rocky Balboa. It is Gollum to his Frodo Baggins. Its ways confound him. Its velcro tabs are a tactical labyrinth. Its sizing system is a Rosetta stone of incomprehensibility. Its posse of baffling accessories (scented disposal bags, pilchers, wipes with or without perfume and moisturiser) may as well have been designed by a vengeful ex for all the comfort they bring to modern man in advertising.

  Huggies – one of the most recognisable global faces of Big Nappy – in 2012 aired an expensive TV ad campaign in the US, in which the company announced it had put its product ‘to the toughest test imaginable: dads. Alone with their babies. In one house. For five days.’ The ad featured highlights of dads racing about with soiled toddlers held aloft, and watching entire sports games while their kids dragged about in dirty pants.

  In this case, there was an immediate backlash against the ad’s outdated and insulting attitudes. ‘Kimberly-Clark also makes products that are used by doctors during surgical procedures,’ read one online petition. ‘Would they ever feel that advertising those products based on “The Ultimate Test: Female Surgeons” was in any way appropriate? Would they defend it as actually “celebrating” the important role of women in the medical field? No. Never.’4

  So many parents wrote in to the company’s Facebook page complaining about the ad’s outdated assumptions that Huggies staged an immediate and unconditional surrender. The company scrubbed all evidence of the ‘Dads watch sport while their kids wallow in ordure’ sequence and replaced it with adorable footage of dads giving their kids a bottle and rocking them to sleep. ‘To prove Huggies can handle anything, we asked real dads to put them to the test. With their own babies!’ the new ad burblingly announced.

  The oldest defence in the book to this kind of stuff is
that women are just better at babies.

  In 2013, when British journalist Peter Hitchens was a guest on the ABC’s Q&A programme, he denounced feminism for remaining silent on the modern exploitation of women in poorly paid jobs while continuing to engage in ‘ceaseless denigration of the most important and responsible task most of us will ever do … the raising of the next generation’.

  ‘Wait!’ interrupted another guest, the US writer Hanna Rosin, author of the menacingly titled The End of Men and very likely near the top of Mr Hitchens’ hit-list of problem feminists. ‘Why do the women have to do it if it’s such an important job?’

  ‘Should I tell you a very simple reason why?’ asked Hitchens, not for the first time that evening raising his voice to be heard over a mutinous rumble from the Q&A crowd. ‘It may not apply to you, but in a lot of cases: they’re better at it. Anybody who’s been involved in raising children knows that women are better at it.’5

  Ah. I feel this is a question we have been dancing around. Are women better at it? Are they just more competent at bringing up children? Is that why they end up doing more of it?

  It’s a tricky one to answer. It might well be that in some sort of Nappy Olympiad or Structured Playoffs, mothers would thump fathers. But does that mean women are inherently better at all this stuff than men are? Or does it just mean they get more practice? I think I am a good writer. I can write a thousand-word column in a couple of hours and, in most circumstances, I would back it to be a better column than one drawn at random from a small group of average Australians, so long as that group didn’t include Laura Tingle or anything. But I was pretty rubbish when I started being a writer. And as much as I might privately fancy myself as the repository of some sort of innate gift, the truth is far less comfortable: the fact that I am good at writing is not entirely unrelated to the fact that, in professional terms, I do nothing else the whole time.