The Wife Drought

by Annabel Crabb

  About the Book

  ‘I NEED A WIFE!’ It’s a common joke among women juggling work and family. But it’s not actually a joke. Having a spouse who takes care of things at home is a Godsend on the domestic front. It’s a potent economic asset on the work front. And it’s an advantage enjoyed – even in our modern society – by vastly more men than women. Working women are in an advanced, sustained, and chronically under-reported state of wife drought, and there is no sign of rain. But why is the work-and-family debate always about women? Why don’t men get the same flexibility that women do? In our fixation on the barriers that face women on the way into the workplace, do we forget about the barriers that – for men – still block the exits?

  The Wife Drought is about women, men, family and work. Written in Annabel Crabb’s inimitable style, it’s full of candid and funny stories from the author’s work in and around politics and the media, historical nuggets about the role of ‘The Wife’ in Australia, and intriguing research about the attitudes that pulse beneath the surface of egalitarian Australia.

  Crabb’s call is for a ceasefire in the gender wars. Rather than a shout of rage, The Wife Drought is the thoughtful, engaging catalyst for a conversation that’s long overdue.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction: the Wife Drought

  1. Awful Men, Hopeless Women

  2. Looking at Things the Wrong Way Up

  3. With This Ring, I Thee Make Redundant

  4. Meanwhile, on the Home Front

  5. A Question of Competence

  6. What’s a Wife Worth?

  7. Public Life? Need a Wife!

  8. Role Reversal

  Conclusion

  References

  Acknowledgements

  Index of Searchable Terms

  About the Author

  Also by Annabel Crabb

  Copyright Notice

  Loved the book?

  To Audrey, Elliott and Kate

  Introduction

  THE WIFE DROUGHT

  It was a funny sort of setting for a personal light-bulb moment. I was interstate at a ‘summit’ – one of those networking events at which various professionals and public policy experts waft about politely waiting for each other to finish before sharing their own views. I was already in a bit of an ill temper about it. Having accepted the invitation to attend, I belatedly opened the conference programme and immediately experienced a familiar, sinking feeling as I scanned the columns and columns of male names – economists, business figures, foreign policy experts – and realised that I had very likely been invited to chock up the event’s skirt-rate.

  All the signs were there. The morning involved a series of panels in which the panellists were all blokes and my job – as moderator – was to provide some sort of perky connective tissue. I noticed with particular horror that the following day I was scheduled to cross-examine, for sixty minutes, a chap who was a world expert in some sort of climatology in which I was significantly less expert. Of course, these things usually turn out to be interesting and worthwhile, and so indeed did this one, but as I headed to lunch on that first day I could not quite subdue the plaintive little voice in the back of my skull asking why I had abandoned my children for this.

  As luck would have it, I ran into an old pal at lunch: a fellow who had been a ministerial adviser in Canberra but was now doing less, for more, in the private sector. We exchanged enthusiastic greetings and sat down. ‘What’s new with you?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m married! And we have a toddler!’ he announced. Much mutual agreement ensued about how lovely children are, and so on.

  ‘Yes, life is great,’ he continued, digging with gusto into his French-trimmed lamb cutlets. ‘My wife has quit her job, so I can be absolutely confident our child’s getting the best of care. It’s all worked out really well.’

  Now, I like this bloke. I really do. And I wish him nothing but happiness. But why did I suddenly want to push his smiling face into the Potatoes Dauphinoise? Was it just because I was in a huff after spending the morning trying to make a group of economists sound interesting, while back in Sydney my own children nosed through rubbish bins for sustenance?

  It’s all worked out really well. I looked around the room, and I recognised what was going on. How many of these blokes had wives at home – picking up kids from school, digging Play-Doh out of the cracks in the floorboards for the gazillionth time, taking Nanna to the doctor, waiting around for the phone guy to turn up ‘between the hours of eight and twelve’, which, as any veteran of the game will tell you, actually means ‘thirty seconds after you have disappeared round the corner for a quick sortie to school to deliver the lunch bag that was left on the table this morning’.

  The hour of 2.45 pm would never, for these men, bring that faint but always perceptible neural pressure. They had wives. I looked at the women I could see in the room. Was it my imagination or did they look kind of distracted?

  I glanced back at my companion, chomping obliviously through his delicious lunch. He didn’t even realise how fortunate he was; what a lucky door prize he’d won. What a weird and – for him – wonderful crimp in the sociological evolution of humanity it was that allowed him to walk out the door at 8 am, work a full and rewarding day, eat a nice lunch with both his hands, and come home – or so I imagined – to a newly bathed baby poised for bed.

  He thought that was just how things worked. And the worst thing of all? He was right. Men get wives, and women don’t. That is how it works.

  I had wife envy, and I had it bad.

  Bouts of wife envy strike me periodically. Sometimes it happens in airports, where I see squads of booming businessmen flocking together into the Qantas Club, while I am skulking by, possibly with a nipper strapped to my chest who has just observed the baby’s prerogative to go what Martin Amis once termed ‘super-void’ in an already spongy nappy just as the final-call sign starts flashing. The resultant reproachful personal paging and walk of shame on to the flight, to be confronted by the politely horrified eyes of my seat neighbour, only exacerbates my envy. ‘Well, yes,’ I want to say to the guy I’m sitting next to. ‘I find this a bit confronting as well, just so you know.’

  I, too, want to go over that report while enjoying a complimentary Crown Lager. I, too, want to talk genially about what a little tiger my young son is, while peacefully completing my meeting presentation, safe in the knowledge that his every need is being met by my beautiful wife. Why am I writing this peering round an infant who is intently stuffing Cheerios up my nose? I want a wife, damn it. And I don’t see how all these bozos get one, when I don’t.

  If you are working full-time, and your spouse is working either part-time or not at all, then – congratulations! You have a ‘wife’. A wife, traditionally, is a person who pulls back on paid work in order to do more of the unpaid work that accumulates around the home (cleaning, fixing stuff, being around for when the plumber doesn’t turn up, spending a subsequent hour on hold to find out why the plumber didn’t turn up, and so on). This sort of work goes into overdrive once you add children to the equation, and the list of household jobs grows exponentially to include quite specialised work such as raising respectful, pleasant young people, and getting stains off things with a paste of vinegar and sodium bicarbonate.

  A ‘wife’ can be male or female. Whether they’re men or women, though, the main thing wives are is a cracking professional asset. They enable the busy full-time worker to experience the joy and fulfilment of children, without the considerable inconvenience of having to pick them up from school at 3 pm, which – in one of the human experience’s wittier little jokes – is the time that s
chool ends, a time that is convenient for pretty much no one. Having a wife means that if you get caught up at work, or want to stay later, either to get some urgent job finished or to frown at your desktop computer in a plausible simulacrum of working in order to impress a new boss while actually reading Buzzfeed, it can be done. Many wives work, but they do jobs that are either part-time or offer sufficient flexibility for the accommodation of late-breaking debacles.

  In the olden days, wives were usually women. Which is funny, because nowadays wives are usually women too.

  I first started thinking seriously about the significance of wives back in 2013, when Tony Abbott named a federal Cabinet with only one woman in it and the nation went into one of its periodic fits of self-examination as to why there aren’t more women in federal politics. I wrote a column expressing my view that if women MPs were blessed with wives in the same way that male MPs frequently are, you might get quite a noticeable participatory uptick, because that way women wouldn’t have to choose between having a career in politics and having a family. Many women have had to do that over the years, while male politicians breed like hamsters while in office and nobody even notices.

  I was left in no doubt, by the resultant stream of correspondence, that asymmetric rates of wife-having are a disparity not restricted to MPs. Businesswomen, executives, academics, journalists and lawyers wrote to me with spookily similar experiences. All of them watched their male contemporaries and competitors start families, and noticed how fatherhood made barely any difference to the way those guys worked; they still worked long hours, travelled at the drop of a hat, or had no difficulty making work functions after-hours. Usually it was because they had wives who either stayed at home full-time or worked fewer hours in order to manage child care. But my correspondents didn’t have wives, and all of them thought life would be easier if they did.

  Right then, I thought. Just out of curiosity, how many working fathers have ‘wives’ in Australia, compared to working mothers? What exactly, in other words, is the comparative national rate of wife-having, expressed as a ratio between women and men? Ascertaining how many working dads have part-time or stay-at-home partners, compared to the other way around, should be a relatively easy business, I assumed. Surely some statistics nut must have had a gander at it at some stage.

  My search for this information began blithely, with a few confident Google key-strokes, but quickly degenerated into a horrifying snarl-up involving the 2011 Census data, much back-of-the-envelope calculation, reams and reams of almost-helpful Australian Bureau of Statistics tables, and some heroic assumptions on my part that would offend any serious statistician. There was plenty of data on fathers’ employment, and mothers’ employment. But that was no use to me; I wanted to join them together, and find out which dads and which mums lived together, and how they managed things between them.

  Eventually, I did what many a statistical fraud would do in my position: I telephoned the Australian Institute of Family Studies, and asked to speak to Jennifer Baxter. I didn’t know Jenny, but her name was on all the most interesting reports I’d read about patterns in male and female employment, especially in relation to families. If anyone could yank the figures I was after, I was fairly confident it would be Jenny. And when I finally ran her to earth, after dealing with the traditional public-relations maze that most agencies have now installed to shield their employees from the horror of journalists cold-calling them, she was pleasantly receptive.

  I explained my problem: what I really wanted was a wife-count. Who had wives? Was it still just a bloke thing? Or were ladies getting them too these days?

  Jenny was exceedingly helpful, and her voice had the rich, reassuring cadence of the super-numerate. Just as I’d hoped. But she warned me not to get too excited. ‘I get a lot of journalists ringing me about stay-at-home dads,’ she said, kindly. ‘Everybody wants a story about how they’re on the rise. But they’re not, really. You look at the data, and it’s just not there.’

  A day or two later, Jenny emailed me an exciting little package of data, which she had tickled out of the 2011 Census data with the assistance of her data-crunching software and her brain; always likely to be a better bet, I guess, than my brain, a pencil, and forty-eight cups of tea, which is what I’d used.

  And here’s the story. Of Australian couple families with kids under the age of fifteen, 60 per cent have a dad who works full-time, and a mum who works either part-time or not at all. How many families have a mum who works full-time, and a dad who is at home or works part-time? Three per cent.1

  Who gets wives? Dads do. Most mums have to make do with alternative arrangements.

  Only one in four mothers with children under the age of fifteen work full-time. These are the women who – in all sorts of lines of work – find themselves in open competition in the full-time workplace. What interests me is: how do their circumstances compare against the dads who are doing similar jobs? How many of the full-time working mothers have ‘wives’, compared with the full-time working dads?

  It turns out that in Australian workplaces, 76 per cent of full-time working dads have a ‘wife’. Three out of four. But among the mothers who work full-time, the rate of wife-having is much, much lower: only 15 per cent.2 Working fathers, in other words, are five times as likely to have a ‘wife’ as working mothers. As I suspected: Australian working women are in an advanced, sustained and chronically under-reported state of wife drought, and there is no sign of rain.

  Not everyone gets married, obviously. Not everyone has children. And not every relationship is a male–female affair. Humanity is a broad church, full of endless fascinating combinations and permutations. But when Australian men and women settle down, buy a fridge and have children together, the patterns are much more pronounced than you might think. This is free-and-easy, egalitarian Australia’s intriguing little secret; our attachment to the male-breadwinner model is deep and robust.

  Not having a wife is an urgent practical disadvantage. If two employees, both parents, are to compete with each other for advancement and promotion, what attributes could they invoke? Natural aptitude, intelligence, rigour, leadership – so far, so good. But what about the ability to work extra hours? To do the networking that in many white-collar industries is central to success, or the long hours and absences from home that are necessary in blue-collar fields?

  If one of those employees has a wife, that employee has an immediate and distinct economic advantage so significant as to be positively anti-competitive. Being able to go to your job and concentrate on your work to the absolute exclusion of all else is something that our system assumes men and women are able to do equally. But that assumption is far from the truth.

  Imagine an industrial system in which 76 per cent of male employees were given cars, but the vast majority of women were obliged to catch the bus. Imagine a system in which white employees got free child care, but black employees didn’t. We would be pretty shocked by either of those arrangements, because our view of fairness is that people shouldn’t miss out on economic privileges just because of their race or gender.

  Well, having a wife is an economic privilege. A privilege that far more men enjoy than women. But it’s a state of affairs so broadly accepted as to be barely mentioned.

  Terrance Fitzsimmons, a researcher from the University of Queensland, wrote a doctoral thesis in 2011 comparing the experiences of male and female CEOs.3 He interviewed about thirty of each in great depth, discovering in the process that men and women who get to the top tend to be different in many ways. But the baldest difference between Fitzsimmons’ CEOs was the way they organised their domestic lives. Of the thirty men he interviewed, twenty-eight had children. And all twenty-eight of those had a stay-at-home wife. Of the thirty-one women he interviewed, only two had stay-at-home husbands, and in both those cases the men were self-employed. The men had wives, and the women didn’t – simple as that. Of the female CEOs who had children (about two-thirds of them, the rest having decided a
gainst it or, as is often the case, simply got to the point in their lives and careers where they realised it wasn’t going to happen) every single one of them identified herself as the primary caregiver.

  Of his interviews with CEOs, Fitzsimmons observes that ‘Many male respondents noted that being a “family man” had made a significant positive contribution to their career progression and ultimate selection as CEO. No female respondents made this connection.’4

  None of this is exactly rocket science. Of course a person with a spouse who takes care of stuff at home will be more free to prosper in the workplace. Yet the weird thing is that among all the reasons we traditionally proffer for women’s under-representation in politics, company boards and so on – blokey culture, bosses who don’t promote women, women who don’t lean in, and so on – the factor of ‘no one at home remembering whether it’s damn mufti day or not’ gets mentioned surprisingly infrequently.

  ‘Oh, but things are changing,’ you might think. ‘I saw that House Husbands show on the telly. I know some hands-on dads.’ And you probably do. But they are unusual – trust me; if you look at the statistics, things aren’t budging much. Over the last twenty years, the proportion of fathers who work has actually gone up – from 86 per cent to 90 per cent. The proportion of fathers who are not working has gone down.5

  Greater flexibility for women? Better support in the workplace? Better mentoring systems? Quotas for boards? Cultural education? Yes, yes, yes. But as the daughters of the 1970s feminists get older, have children later, and cluster together to talk – not about sex and art, but about the challenges of doing a good job of both work and family – and they joke to each other ‘What I really need is a wife!’, we need to understand that it’s not actually a joke.