The Wife Drought

by Annabel Crabb

  Another woman, ‘Joan F’, married in secret, and lived in a state of professional paranoia as a result.

  I found myself in a constant state of tension, frightened of a slip of the tongue which might mean the arbitrary end of my job. For obvious reasons I tended not to answer questions put in a friendly fashion by my friends. Then I became pregnant and as my husband and I were saving for him to have a period out of work to study for a higher degree, I continued to work until I became visibly pregnant. I would very much have liked to continue working up to and after the birth of my child. If necessary I would not have hesitated spending all my earnings on providing good care for my child so that I could continue with the work for which I was trained and which gave me satisfaction.6

  That a piece of legislation designed to reinforce the holy union of marriage was indirectly encouraging some women to lie, cheat and fornicate does not seem to have occasioned much comment in the federal legislature. But in 1958, the Boyer Committee’s inquiry into public service recruitment recommended that the ban be repealed.

  The Minister for Labour and National Service, Billy McMahon, received a confidential memo from his departmental secretary, Harry Bland, urging him to back the recommendation, as doing so would ‘enable us to hold up our own heads at ILO [International Labour Organisation] conferences’.

  ‘I should have thought it has political value,’ Bland scribbled by hand, adding slyly: ‘Get rid of this and we may have a little more peace on equal pay.’7

  But the office of Prime Minister Robert Menzies was underwhelmed. ‘There is altogether a curious tangle here,’ wrote Menzies’ senior adviser Dr Ronald Mendelsohn to his boss in 1962. ‘Were you to refer the question of employment of married women, or the somewhat related question of equal pay for equal work, to an appointed Committee nicely balanced pro and con, guineas to peanuts it would recommend the feminist view-point. Were you to take a popular vote the conservative view would have a much better run. The issue is far more likely to lose votes than to win votes, however it is played. Delay seems the best gambit …’8

  It was – politically – a dicey call. Unemployment was on the rise, and the unions did not like the idea of inviting married women to join the work-seeking scrum. And the marriage bar itself was not – it must be said – unpopular. As late as 1956, Woman’s Day polled its readers and found that they were six-to-one against married women working, mainly because it was felt that the needs of young children should be put first. In 1960, a Gallup poll reported that 78 per cent of Australians opposed the mothers of young children entering the workforce.9

  ‘The Cabinet expressed no enthusiasm,’ records Cabinet Secretary John Bunting in a 1962 minute. ‘It preferred the status quo, though so as not to provoke the feminists and others, decided to lie low for the time being rather than come out with a statement. The question is whether standing still is any longer an acceptable gambit.’10

  The government indeed lay low for several more years, and it was not until October 1966 that the Holt government finally repealed the legislation, and married women were freed to work in the public sector. Merle Thornton later became an academic, designing Australia’s first women’s studies course. The Regatta Hotel named a room after her: The Thornton Room, where women go for refreshments. She writes plays, periodically including roles for her famous second-born child, Sigrid.

  If I’ve recounted this particular episode at some length, it’s only to reinforce how serious a matter of overt government policy it was, barely fifty years ago, to ensure that men should be provided with a reliable source of wives. Proper wives, that is; not some distracted working girl with half an eye on the office who would in all likelihood burn the chops.

  Wives were a particular kind of national resource. They were no threat to men in an employment sense; far from it. Rather, they improved men’s ability to work by supplying a stable home environment, various broadly understood comforts and adorable children, whose very existence would in turn contribute a powerful evolutionary impetus to work hard and prosper. The act of getting hitched made men into more valuable employees, and gave them a stronger moral position from which to ask for a promotion of more job security.

  The phrase ‘family man’ still evokes a whole series of reassuring impressions concerning a potential employee’s home life; something about the phrase connotes solidity, dependability, a home life filled with nourishing meals and games of Scrabble. Possibly, a labrador could be involved. Being married, as a man, meant you were contributing to the stability of the nation, and could probably be depended upon to continue doing so, starting with your job.

  Getting married as a woman, though, had exactly the opposite effect. The very same factor – the acquisition of a home, and possibly children – was not expected to make women more reliable at work. It was thought to make them unreliable. Worse than that, a woman who sought to work after her marriage was considered to be a destabilising influence both at home and at work, where she thoughtlessly weakened the fabric of the nation by occupying a job that should have been a man’s, thereby occasioning two households to go hungry, rather than just one.

  Obviously, women are no longer compelled to quit their jobs upon getting married. The marriage rate is now lower, so it would be a less effective piece of policy anyway. And no one publicly prosecutes, any more, the idea that a woman with a family should not work. The marriage ban has the gently ridiculous feel of ancient history; tales of taking off your wedding ring to go to work sound as though they should rank with men riding to factories on penny-farthings.

  But even when it seems ancient – or ridiculous – history shapes us, and leaves its unmistakeable crenellations upon our modern lives. Women are not now routinely fired as a result of getting married; we can file that one away with ‘not allowed to vote’ and ‘being burned as a witch’ as one of those funny old things that doesn’t happen any more. But that is not to say that marriage and children don’t – in the workplace – still do very different things for women compared with what they do for men.

  Marriage, for men, means being paid more money. The phenomenon known as the ‘marriage premium’ is recorded in many countries, and in Australia married men earn on average about 15 per cent more than unmarried ones.11

  Why is this? Well, you could assemble a group of sociologists and have a long and exciting argument on this question, but it all boils down to two basic theories, as far as I can tell.

  The first is something called ‘selection’, which is the theory that the kinds of men who are successful at work are also the kinds of men who are more likely to find spouses easily. There is plenty of evidence that people who are good-looking and socially confident do better at work, and tend to get promoted, not to mention sent on all the good conferences. These are also characteristics that historically make a man a good catch, maritally speaking. Obviously, there are some natural limits to this theory, given that there are also some characteristics that simultaneously make a man a very good employee and a very annoying husband, like being at work until 11 pm, or wearing company merchandise to unrelated social occasions.

  As ever, human relationships are confounding. Why do we do what we do? And when is a pattern a pattern? Is the marriage premium just about the same cohort of blokes monopolising all the good jobs and all the chicks, or is there something else going on?

  In the late 1990s, two intrepid researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta conducted a study of men in ‘shotgun marriages’ to see if the pattern held.12 The researchers reasoned that while women pursuing a rigorous recruitment process to find a husband might behave similarly to employers, unions that were mandated by an incautious bout of grappling in the back seat of a Pontiac might be a little more … uncluttered by the more orthodox mechanics of spousal choice.

  They found that even in shotgun marriages, 90 per cent of the marriage premium remained. Married men get paid more, even when marriage was kind of accidental.

  This suggests that there is somethin
g intrinsic about being lashed to a lady that makes a man – in the eyes of the world – a better bet.

  The other theory for why married men are better paid is to do with ‘specialisation’. That is the idea that when couples settle down to live together, they implicitly begin to divide life’s labours between themselves. If one partner takes care of cooking, for instance, that not only relieves the other partner of that job; it actively creates time which he or she can spend on getting much better at doing something else. If one partner takes responsibility for earning enough to support the household, the other can run the household.

  It is as true for small jobs as big ones. In my house, for instance, I am responsible for present-wrapping. This is partly because I am supremely good at it; for some reason, I was born with an ability to tie bows that look good, and when I wrap a present, I like to use a proper ribbon, and paper that jauntily offsets that ribbon. Also, I will usually make a card. For these reasons, and also because I care if someone gets a present or not, I have been the Gift Procurement Officer for many years now. So I keep getting better at it, while Jeremy’s skills have eroded to the point where his parcels look like the hastily concealed murder weapons of a homicidal maniac.

  Not that he’s been idle, mind; the free hours each week in which Jeremy might – had things panned out differently – have spent gift-wrapping have instead been used productively to make him much better than me at some other stuff. Becoming the IT Help Desk, for instance. His command of software, hardware, and which-cords-go-where are so noticeably superior to mine that I have given up even trying to maintain basic competency, and am as helpless in the face of Apple TV as he is when confronted by an awkwardly shaped gift item.

  This is specialisation, and in terms of human economy it’s very effective. As a team, we are collectively excellent both at present-wrapping and information technology. If we were to split up, however, I could never watch movies and he would be an underwhelming birthday party guest. Such fracture of these domestic chore-allocation arrangements, which begin casually and over time become absolute, is part of the reason why divorce is so painful; added to the pain of lost love is the altogether more humiliating task of having to relearn incredibly basic stuff from the ground up.

  But specialisation also applies to big stuff. Despite all the changes that have taken place in Australian society in the past few decades, there is a clear and change-resistant pattern in the way heterosexual couples – especially those with children – divide work between themselves. Men do more of the paid work, and women more of the unpaid. The theory is that this liberates husbands to excel in the workplace and collect all the benefits of a well-run home (good nutrition, clean clothes, a feeling of security and purpose, children, something uncontroversial to make small talk with the boss about during those awkward lift rides) without having to do all the grunt work themselves. Wives, meanwhile, spared by this arrangement from the necessity to do all the earning, are able to become very good at the unpaid jobs, such as raising children, knowing if the school concert is tonight or next week, and making sure there’s milk.

  I know this all sounds pretty hokey. No one buys that 1950s husband-and-wife stuff any more – right? Well, the fact is that we do still buy it. The most common arrangement among Australian families with children is for Dad to work full-time, and for Mum to work either part-time or not at all, while Mum will do about twice as much housework as Dad.

  What does marriage do to a woman’s job prospects? Not much at all, is the most likely answer; whereas Australian men can look forward to a ‘marital bump’ in earnings after the happy event, no such phenomenon has been recorded for women. For women, anyway, the big, life-changing difference doesn’t come with marriage itself; it comes with children.

  Children change things for both men and women. In Australia, an average 25-year-old man can expect to earn a lifetime total of $2 million over a forty-year working life, if he doesn’t have children. If he does have children, however, this figure is bumped up to $2.5 million.13

  For women, though, parenthood exerts the opposite effect. A childless woman can actually expect to earn just about as much as her childless male counterpart – $1.9 million over the course of her forty years at work. But if she has babies, that total dips to just $1.3 million. She will earn $600,000 less than a childless woman, and a full $1.2 million less than a father.

  This is where the economics of the wife drought become rather brutal. Having a wife carries all sorts of economic advantages – like being able to work harder and for longer hours, and not having to drive a carload of yammering progeny to swimming lessons. Being a wife, however, carries all sorts of economic disadvantages. Like not being paid for any of the above-mentioned stuff.

  One of the standout pieces of research in this area was conducted in 2007 at Stanford University.14 Researchers called in a bunch of undergraduate participants and told them their assistance was being sought by a Californian startup communications company looking for a marketing officer to set up a new East Coast office.

  Each participant was told that the successful candidate’s salary range would be between $135,000 and $180,000. Each participant was given two candidates to consider: either two women or two men. In each case, the candidates had qualifications that had proven functionally identical in a pre-testing round; but one was a parent, and one wasn’t, a fact made clear by the inclusion – in one CV – of a reference to the candidate being a ‘Parent–Teacher Association Coordinator’.

  So what happened?

  When two women were up against each other, one clearly a parent and one from whose CV it could readily be inferred that she was childless, the mother lost out on just about every factor. She was considered slightly less competent. She was considered significantly less committed. She was considered suitable for hiring 47 per cent of the time, while her childless competitor was recommended for hire 84 per cent of the time. Her recommended starting salary averaged $137,000, compared to $148,000 for the non-mother. And she was thought to be potential management material by 69 per cent of respondents, compared to 84 per cent who fancied the long-term chances of her rival.

  But when the two candidates were a father and a non-father, participants in the experiment had entirely different responses.

  The father candidate was considered slightly more competent than the non-father. He was anticipated to be more committed to the work. His recommended starting salary averaged out at $150,000 – more than either of the female candidates, and more than the childless bloke whose qualifications were otherwise functionally identical, and who got the nod for a starting wage of $144,000. And as for his prospects: Dad was thought likely to be management material by a thumping 93.6 per cent of respondents. His non-dad competitor was thought appropriate for advancement by 85 per cent.

  So having a child made women less likely to be employed, and less likely to be trusted, promoted, and generally thought suitable. But for fathers, having a family actually gave them a competitive edge. Weirdly enough, the very same reservations that were aroused by the discreet existence of children in a woman’s CV – potential lack of commitment, unworthiness for promotion, and so on – were actively abolished by the existence of children in a man’s.

  How can the very same factor – having children – cause such differing effects in men and women? When the starting assumptions are different. And starting assumptions about how women and men will behave – even in a regulated environment like the Australian workplace – continue to be different.

  The assumption is that men and women will respond differently to becoming parents. And the cold, hard truth is that that assumption is a fair one. Men and women do respond differently to becoming parents. Men do not adjust their work patterns very much at all when they have their first child; in fact, if anything, as we’ve already seen, they increase their work hours.15

  Women, however, are much more likely to work part-time after having a child. Of employed mothers of young children, 43 per cent work pa
rt-time, but only 5 per cent of corresponding fathers do.16

  This is the shape of women’s and men’s lives in the Australian workplace. When children grow up and progress through school and university, girls outperform boys; and, of the children who grow up into young people who want to go to university, more women will graduate than men. They get jobs at roughly equal rates, and move into middle-management roles in about the same numbers.

  But when they have children, the paths diverge. Men’s careers rattle along uninterrupted, while women are far more apt to change the way they work to suit the other things going on in their lives. Men’s jobs are disrupted by recessions; women’s jobs are disrupted by family.

  So whatever we have weeded out of our system in terms of actual restrictions on married women working in paid jobs, there remains a stubborn series of assumptions about what men and women will probably be good at, how they will behave, and what they will likely rate as their first priority. These assumptions, as I explained in Chapter 1, are not always even conscious. They distort the judgement of employers without those employers necessarily realising it.

  They evolve like a muscle memory, and they are wordlessly reinforced by experience. This happens in big things just as it does in small. The better I get at wrapping presents, the more I do it, and the more settled and reasonable the proposition becomes that I am the present-wrapping type, while Jeremy is your go-to man if you want to series-link Breaking Bad.

  I didn’t really intend things to turn out this way, and neither did he. Present-wrapping is so girly, and the fact that I can’t (I lapse here into antique terminology) programme a video recorder is substantially embarrassing to my feminist self. But that’s where we are. It just happened. I might defensively add that he is better than me at laundry and tidying up. But I cannot deny the gendered quality of our most obviously diversified skills. If there is a button to be sewn on, I’m your first point of contact. Hard rubbish issues? See my husband.