The Wife Drought

How can you test whether something's an assumption? Try this: switch things around, and check how bananas everybody goes.

smouldering away in a fit of impotent rage

Why, after all these decades of campaign, reform, research and thought about how we can best get women into the workplace, are we so slow to pick up that the most important next step is how to get men out of it?

The paid work that women do has expanded. But so have the expectations of motherhood. A 2006 study of American women found that modern mothers who work full-time actually spend more hours one-on-one with their children per week than their stay-at-home mothers had in 1976.2 They just feel far more inadequate and guilty.

Let’s take a woman, and make her twenty-five years old and give her a postgraduate education. Let’s call her ‘Jane’. If she works for forty years, Jane is likely – if things go according to the average experience – to earn a lifetime total of $2.49 million. But if you take a second graduate, and call him ‘Jeff’, and give him exactly the same qualifications as Jane and bless him with the same degree of averageness, he ends his forty-year career with a lifetime total of $3.78 million.11 That amounts to, as Anne Summers pointed out in her book The Misogyny Factor, ‘a million dollar penalty for being a young woman in Australia today’.

When men and women produce a baby together for the first time, it's an absolute festival of mutual incompetence.

Have a look at the results when Australians are asked if they agree or disagree with the statement: ‘It is better for the family if the husband is the principal breadwinner outside the home and the wife has primary responsibility for the home and children.’ In 1986, just over 55 per cent of men agreed with that proposition. That proportion swan-dived down to about 30 per cent by 2001, but by 2005, it had gone up again, to 41.4 per cent. Women subscribe to that view less enthusiastically than men on the whole, but they too have waxed and waned over the last 30 years. In 1986, 33 per cent of them thought it was better for men to work and women to keep house. By 2001, that had dipped to 19 per cent. But by 2005, it had bobbed back up to 36.4 per cent.