The Wife Drought

by Annabel Crabb

  It’s not a joke, because women who work full-time are not only statistically less likely to have a wife; they’re still fairly likely to be a wife. Even when mothers work full-time, they still do more than twice as much household work as their full-time working husbands: forty-one hours a week compared to twenty.6

  The last five decades might feel as though they have brought about a gender revolution, but the most revolutionary aspects have been contained largely to one side of the ledger: women taking on more paid work. To a great extent, women have maintained their unpaid jobs at home too, and men have not filled the breach. The obligation that evolves for working mothers, in particular, is a very precise one; the feeling that one ought to work as if one did not have children, while raising one’s children as if one did not have a job. To do any less feels like failing at both. This explains the constant state of tension and anxiety widely reported by working mothers.

  I think of a Candid Camera show I once saw where applicants for a job in a doughnut factory were told they needed to do a trial shift on the boxing line. Secretly filmed, the candidates donned their hairnets and sat down at a conveyor belt, stacking freshly made doughnuts neatly into boxes. But as they worked, the conveyor belt got faster and faster. The piles of doughnuts got messier and messier as the poor victims tried to keep up. Eventually, they were just chucking the things into the boxes any which way, as more and more doughnuts relentlessly poured forth from the maw of the machine. It was – in the classic manner of such TV shows – utterly unbearable to watch.

  That segment summarises to me what juggling work and family feels like. You start off all right, and all your doughnuts are going where they are supposed to go. But as more jobs materialise, and more deadlines bob up, and freakishly unexpected developments arrive (your child comes down with gastro; the hot water tap in the bathroom inexplicably gets jammed at full-bore; your boss announces that now would be a good time for you to deliver a formal progress report on your project to the board; suddenly the prime minister’s on the TV announcing a snap Royal Commission into something; everyone gets nits), everything has to be done just that little bit faster, and the faster you go the more the panic rises, as does the guilt about doing everything just that little bit worse. You’re just hurling the damn doughnuts now, hating doughnuts and wondering why anyone would ever bother eating the stupid things anyway. Generally, it’s at this point that you’ll realise that you forgot it was your mother’s birthday yesterday. Or you’ll stub your toe, and dissolve into a wail of entirely disproportionate self-pity.

  It’s not just about the work hours involved. Paid work can be demanding, stressful and exacting. But work in the home can consume a huge amount of emotional bandwidth, in which failure brings a sense of guilt and self-recrimination far more tearing and existential than what you feel when you bugger something up mildly at work.

  For example: I am fast approaching the deadline for finishing this book. In the last twelve weeks, I’ve written eighty thousand words. In the weeks to come, there are dense weeks of parliamentary drama, the planning of a new Kitchen Cabinet series, several speeches and God knows what else. But the only thing that has actually reduced me to tears is Chiquita, a foot-tall stuffed kangaroo.

  Chiquita lives at the childcare centre my four-year-old son attends twice a week. Every holiday, a lucky child gets to take Chiquita home and show her a good time. Chiquita travels with her own scrapbook, and the idea is that parents will capture action shots of Chiquita’s adventures with her juvenile escort, then paste them into the book to create a permanent marsupial travel diary. At Easter, it was our turn.

  Chiquita had a quiet holiday. We forgot to take her to the Easter Show. We forgot to take her to the pool. We forgot to take her to the museum. Any outing we actually achieved was undertaken in Chiquita’s absence; she spent most of Easter perched hopefully on the dinner table. It was only at the eleventh hour of the Easter egg hunt, when the children were half-heartedly poking through undergrowth for any overlooked goodies, that anyone remembered to get a snap of Chiquita even vaguely near the action. The day before Chiquita was due back, the task of printing out the lame Chiquita pictures drummed at the back of my skull. I had a column and two speeches to write. Three o’clock was fast approaching. I had just enough time to get to the photo shop, if I hustled. The discovery that the photo shop had gone out of business the day before very nearly finished me. With Herculean restraint, I did not actually claw hysterically at the expressionless roller door securing the defunct shop’s dim interior. But I wanted to.

  Sticking pictures of a nomadic stuffed kangaroo in a book is – in economic terms – an insignificant piece of work, of no interest to national productivity, immaterial to the formal prosperity of my household. But the emotional exposure is considerable, and this is at the heart of the Chiquita Syndrome: I do not want my son to be the kid who brings the Chiquita book back blank because his mum was too busy to organise it. Failing Chiquita isn’t like failing as an employee; it feels like failing as a person, which cuts much deeper, notwithstanding the triviality of the enterprise itself.

  Chiquita is a small but typical example of ‘wife work’ – utterly invisible to the national economy, but significant to the wellbeing of a family. She fits beautifully into the job specifications for the position of ‘wife’, which might look something like this:

  Opening exists for leader of a small, spirited team in a vibrant but often chaotic environment. Applicant must be mature and patient, as team members may at times be prone to sudden mood swings, unorthodox social techniques, strategic tunnel vision and outright insubordination.

  Applicant will have responsibility for cleaning, laundering, tutoring, light maintenance, heavy maintenance, procurement, occupational health and safety, occupational therapy, nutrition, ethical guidance counselling, transport, skills training, intra-team human resource management, outsourcing, mentoring, mediation, education and sanitation.

  Fine motor control and calm temperament a must. Creative experience and demonstrated innovation strong advantages, esp. capacity to construct, for example, a plausible bat costume from basic household items in under ten minutes.

  Some tasks may be repetitive. Formal performance assessment very limited, though applicant may self-assess regularly in bleaker moments.

  Salary nominal.

  If you look at this gig through the eyes of a conventional job-seeker, it’s pretty obvious why blokes do not regularly apply. The signposts of success in the workplace – the clear milestones and targets, the achievement of which might earn you backslaps or bonuses or both – are nowhere to be seen. You don’t get paid, which I guess is sort of a deal-breaker for some people straight up. Achievements may frequently prove fleeting, and soon forgotten. Washed clothes get dirty again. A perfectly balanced, home-cooked dinner still gets eaten, and will encounter exactly the same digestive fate as frozen pizza. Toys, blocks and general filth will quickly reclaim any territory cleared by even quite concerted parental effort. Some of the key performance indicators – looking at you, Chiquita – are so random as to be ridiculous.

  If you do well at this job, the returns are hugely significant: good relationships with your children, a balanced approach to life, probably a happy retirement in which you will be able to enjoy yourself with gentle pursuits, rather than working till you’re seventy and then dropping dead. But we’re talking some pretty long-tail business there. In the meantime maybe someone will thank you for it. Or maybe they won’t.

  Paid work is hard, but it offers predictability. Anyone who – dressed, clean, showered and ready for the day – has ever clicked the front door shut at 8.30 am on a scene of roiling domestic chaos within will be familiar with the rich sense of possibility and calm available to the escaping parent. Perhaps a cup of coffee at the train station? One that can be procured with newspaper in hand, and no accompanying small people demanding a biscuit? To the non-primary carer spouse, a cup of coffee in a shop is nothing – a mere bagatelle. To a
person lugging small children about, a cup of coffee in a shop can be a space mission requiring considerable equipment, detailed advance site knowledge (can I even get this damn pram in there?) and the ever-present spectre of social humiliation.

  So, yes, recruitment for male wives is a tricky thing. So tricky, in fact, that many women in particularly demanding jobs just give up looking.

  A brief word to male readers. I do not propose to spend the entire length of these pages smouldering away in a fit of impotent rage next to innocent chaps happily eating French-trimmed lamb cutlets. And I am more than aware that if you are a man reading this book you have either A) an already evolved appreciation of work–life responsibility and are propping the pages up as you complete a large batch of bolognese sauce for the freezer or B) a wife with a .22 rifle trained at your temple. I shall have some very nice things to say about you at various points.

  This is not a book of rage, on the whole. And – more importantly – it’s not just a book about women. Because in all the research and argument and thought that’s been expended over the past five decades on the question of why women don’t succeed at work like men do there’s a great, gaping hole. It’s a man-shaped hole.

  What I can’t believe is this: 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?

  I don’t mean that in a ‘burn their punch cards and barricade the corner office’ way, either. I mean that if we are serious about equality, we should stop worrying so exclusively about women’s ease of access to the workplace and start worrying more about men’s ease of egress from it.

  ‘Women have trouble asking for pay rises, and men have trouble asking for time off,’ is how my sagacious friend and colleague, the writer George Megalogenis, once put it to me.

  And I wonder if we are perhaps looking at things the wrong way up. So much has changed for women, even over my lifetime. The year before I was born just north of Adelaide, women in my home state of South Australia were still obliged to resign from their state public service jobs when they got married. In the forty-one years since, women have surged into the workforce at a considerable clip. They’ve overtaken men in tertiary education.

  And yet, for men, weirdly little has changed. While the horizons for women have opened right up, the baseline expectations of men are pretty much what they were when I was born: grow up, get a job, have children (an event which will make little discernible difference to your working life apart from probably making you a better bet for a pay rise), retire and expire. Fathers are expected to be more involved with their children than their own fathers were, certainly. But they are expected to do that in their own spare time; while the workplace has changed hugely to accommodate women over the last half-century, it still takes a largely dim view of men who want to work flexibly so they can pick up their kids from school.

  What would happen if we stopped looking at this situation as one in which women are the victims, and started looking at what men miss out on? For example, Australia has one of the highest rates of part-time work in the OECD; nearly twice the rate in the United States.7 (The vast majority of part-time workers are women; that’s the compromise we have reached, wordlessly, as a nation, to the great industrial thumbscrew of women who want to do more work and men who don’t want to do any less.)

  We often look at part-time work as inferior to full-time work. But to have flexibility at work is quite a marvellous thing. Working part-time has a range of drawbacks, but it can be a superb and workable solution to different phases of the life cycle, as human beings respond to the needs of others, be they children, ageing relatives, or sick friends and family. That is a normal, human thing to do. But somewhere along the way, we’ve settled on the idea that this is a normal, lady thing to do. Forty-three per cent of Australian mothers with primary school children work part-time, for example, but only 5 per cent of fathers do.8

  Surveys regularly find that Australian men – especially fathers – would prefer to work fewer hours. But lots of them never ask. Why? Are they fibbing about wanting to see more of their kids? Or are they genuinely concerned that doing so would damage their standing at work?

  And let’s not shy away from the difficult questions here: Could it also be because the world of ‘home’ has as many intricate secret handshakes and baffling key performance indicators today as the world of ‘work’ had when women first started turning up? Could the one man showing up for school reading or canteen duty possibly feel just as exposed and uncomfortable as the one woman showing up to the board meeting might?

  The soft, redeeming glow of gender-neutral language (parenting, it’s now called, not mothering) bathes everything in the presumption of neutrality, but the truth is that Australia still has some pretty rigorous expectations about who is likely to do which jobs. Niggly little bat-signals tell mothers they would be more normal if they didn’t work. ‘Aren’t you exhausted?’ or ‘Who’s looking after the children?’ the working mother is often asked, though nobody would ask her husband the same question. The prime minister’s 2013 campaign reference to ‘the housewives of Australia … as they do their ironing’ articulated the presumption clearly. And niggly little signals tell fathers they would be more normal if they didn’t look after their kids (‘Off to be Mr Mum, are you?’).

  Obviously, this is a big country and there are innumerable exceptions. The hardest thing about writing a book like this is the knowledge that it’ll be read one person at a time. Every person is different; every family, too. You might split everything evenly in your house, or have a best mate who is a blissful home dad. I don’t dispute that. All I’m saying is that, by and large, you are in a minority.

  And it’s awkward – awkward! – talking about this stuff even at the best of times. Every decision people make about how to manage working with having a family is haunted by the ghosts of the paths unchosen. Parents who work worry that they are short-changing their kids. Parents who don’t work feel they are invisible to the rest of society. As a result, the levels of defensiveness around this subject are sky high. If I offend you with my generalisations, I apologise; I generalise only, I hope, when the evidence warrants it.

  Just by the way, I will regularly use the word ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ when talking about any heterosexual, live-in partnership, regardless of whether rings are on fingers. I think this is fair enough, given the modern popularity of de facto relationships, but I am also aware that many families do not conform to this formula in any event; they might be childless, or same-sex, or single-parent. Obviously, any broad conclusions about the typical domestic arrangements of a heterosexual couple family with children will not apply to those families. This doesn’t mean those people are insignificant, unworthy of discussion or don’t have their problems. But this is a book about women and men, and the big patterns that still emerge – stubbornly, undeniably – across this country when women and men get together and make a family.

  A personal disclosure, at this point, seems fair. I have three small children, and a full-time job. I have a partner who also works full-time. Our families live mostly interstate. I do not have a wife (poor me), and neither does he (poor him).

  I get asked all the time, ‘How do you do it all?’ No one ever asks my partner that, which is kind of unfair, seeing as he does a lot of juggling too. But the answer is: I don’t. Do it all, that is. Not at the same time, anyway. No one does. You get all the help you can, whenever you can, and the rest you squish into the time you have available. My partner, Jeremy, works flexibly one day a week. The little children are in day care two days a week. For the last six years, we have hosted, off and on, a series of live-in au pairs. Because I work weird hours, often starting early or finishing late, there is pretty much no childcare centre that would fully meet our needs; the last-minute radio interviews, the travel, the speaking engagements, the days on which all hell breaks loose and sud
denly federal politics becomes a rolling story. Having a third person around to pick up unexpected slack is an incredible advantage, without which our place would not be able to function. It also means that the children are near to where I am working. I see them all the time, even when I am working flat out, and that is a piece of good fortune for which I am grateful every day.

  Because I work online a lot, I can write and file copy much more flexibly than newspaper writers can. I cram it into times when children are sleeping, or at school, or at child care, or when I have a babysitter in place. I go back to work once they’re in bed. I catch the bus so I can work on the way to work. I time my shower to coincide with the broadcast of the morning radio current affairs show AM, so that I don’t waste any time. I use every scrap of the day like an Italian farmer uses all of the pig.

  At times, I have done ridiculous things. We started making the third series of Kitchen Cabinet when my youngest daughter, Kate, was about ten weeks old. So she came with me to work, in a baby sling. I wrote standing up, at a Rumsfeldesque work-desk composed of the dining room table, eight cookbooks and a laptop, so that she could sleep on me while I worked. (She decided against sleeping in cots. Tried it once, didn’t like it.) When we shot episodes of the show at a politician’s house, our series producer Madeleine walked around outside with my baby strapped to her chest and a remote earpiece in her ear, listening to the action on set. (Madeleine also researched this book. I hope, in time, she may agree to marry me, but I don’t want to rush her.)

  I have changed that baby on Jenny Macklin’s floor, in Craig Emerson’s bedroom, in Malcolm Turnbull’s farm library, and at one point – starved of alternative child-care options – I got Bill Heffernan to hold her. My parents drove from their Adelaide Plains farm to Broken Hill to serve as on-set nannies.