The Wife Drought: Why Every Career Needs a Wife at Home

If one day a female friend suddenly complains, “I want a wife too!” — would you assume the job had broken her mind?

Of course it is a joke. But it points at a real question: why must the person who plays the role of “wife” always be a woman?

The dictionary defines a wife as someone who works part-time or full-time in the home and carries the housework. But “wife” is not really a matter of sex — it means anyone who supports a partner’s full-time job by staying home to keep house and raise children. Yet then and now, that role has by convention fallen to women.

Annabel Crabb is an Australian journalist and a full-time mother. Her days are a scramble, and under the model in which women are responsible for all domestic work, everyone loses — men included. She argues that the model has to change, and that the fight for equality is not for women alone but for everyone.

Why There Are No Women at the Top

At work, some mediocre men are always a step ahead of women.

Over the past two decades, women have far outnumbered men at university, making up 60% of graduates. The higher you go, the thinner the numbers: women hold 40% of middle-management posts and 10% of senior ones; at CEO level, just 2–3%.

Why? Explanations abound: sexism; women only want a family and have no interest in power; men are more ambitious and work harder, so they climb faster. Crabb boils them down to one sharp line — men are awful, women are helpless.

Men are awful because they unconsciously prefer to hire other men. Women are helpless because, caught between home and work, they keep giving up promotions for the family. That worry leaves them fearful and passive at work, less enterprising than men.

Young women offered a promotion often do not know what to say; the commonest response is “I don’t know if I can do it,” “are you sure I’m up to it” — anxieties men rarely voice. Money is the same: among graduates, men’s starting salaries are 7.6% higher; asked whether they had ever requested a raise, 57% of men said yes, against 7% of women.

When awful men and helpless women work together, the former naturally get the head start and the better deal.

The Wrong Question: How Do We Get Men to Leave Work?

How do you fix that imbalance? The answer may be: let women work, and let men stay home.

“Perhaps the real problem,” Crabb says, “is not how to get more women into work, but how to get men out of it.”

We talk constantly about equality at work, yet sex itself is unequal; we focus so hard on how women can escape the workplace trap that we ignore what keeps men from leaving their jobs. In Australia, three-quarters of working women would change jobs for family reasons; only a third of men would. Unlike women, men tend to work harder for money once they have a family — which means more overtime.

Why do we argue endlessly about women’s troubles at work and so rarely discuss what men lose at home? Because society widely holds that a man caring for children loses face — so the burden of care falls, as if by nature, on women. A man who chooses to stay home with the children is teased as a “stay-at-home dad,” as though it were embarrassing proof that he lacks drive.

And so men miss out on much that only women are offered — parental leave, in Australia’s case. That time is not only precious for being with a child; it is a chance to re-examine your career and your life. Many women who leave work for the family gain, precisely by doing so, the time to work out what a career would require — and to understand themselves better.

Ask stay-at-home fathers why they are at home and 80% cite unemployment or illness; only 20% say it was their own choice. Ask women the same question and roughly 90% say they gave up work for the children.

So a loop forms: men do not give up work easily, and promotion and pay rises make leaving harder still; meanwhile companies assume a woman will eventually leave for children, so they offer a modest salary from the start — which becomes one more reason she ends up at home.

Over the past fifty years, women’s lot at work has improved enormously. And men? They may have got somewhere at work, but at home they play the same part as ever. “Society’s expectations of men now place a heavier burden on them, and nobody asks what they want. That is sad for children and sad for men.”

Fifty Years Ago: Marriage Meant Resignation

Fifty years ago, a woman who married ended her career. Australia’s public service law provided that every female employee must retire on marriage. The old rule was known as the marriage bar.

Its justification sounded decent: children would get more care at home. In Australia it was widely accepted — nearly 78% of people opposed mothers of young children working, holding that caring for children mattered most.

People believed a family man could be relied on, because he had to work hard to support them; a woman who kept working after marriage was thought unreliable — she would neglect the home for the job, and compete with men for work. It is still so today: men mostly earn, women mostly keep house. People still believe a man cared for at home will work harder, and a woman free of work worries will put more into home and children.

The numbers are cold: married men earn on average 15% more than unmarried women. A woman who never has children can earn $1.9 million over forty years, the same as a man; once she marries and has children, she earns $700,000 less than a man of equal qualifications. Children are a major cause of the earnings gap between married men and women.

The Ledger of Housework

In a traditional Japanese household, women spend five times as long on housework as men; Australian women do 60% more than men; worldwide, women do twice as much. Norway is the exception: its women do only half an hour more — because Norway encourages men to stay home, and has the longest paternity leave in the world.

Surveys show full-time working men do about 16 hours of housework a week, part-timers 15, full-time homemakers 20. Women, even in full-time jobs, do at least 25 hours a week; full-time housewives, 42.

People assume women bear more responsibility for home and children. Visit a friend’s house, see it in a mess, and most people assume the hostess has failed. Yet the time a woman spends doing housework alone is usually 18 times a man’s. Men use the time a woman keeps house to get ahead at work, then come home and care for the children with her, rarely doing housework alone — which entrenches the idea that women run the home and men help out.

In most cases a woman’s wages go on the children. When she leaves work to have them, she loses not just income but, very likely, a whole career.

The Myth That Men Are Naturally Bad at Housework

We assume men are naturally bad at housework: they have affairs of state to run, so a mistake at home is forgivable. There is even a saying — that a man who is clumsy about housework escapes blame and is thought charming — which shows how deeply we believe the home is women’s territory.

Hence a matching fantasy: an incompetent husband needs a super-competent wife. A man who cannot cook needs a wife who is a credit in the drawing room and a treasure in the kitchen, so that their work skills and domestic skills “complement” each other.

But “women know how to look after children” does not mean they are born knowing. A couple meeting their first baby are equally at a loss. Norway introduced a father’s leave quota in 1993, pushing men home to help their wives. The evidence shows that men who take leave find it easier to become fathers afterwards. The aim was to raise the number of women in the workforce; seen another way, it gave men a chance to learn to care for children and to run a home.

What Is a Housewife’s Labour Worth?

In Australia a cleaner costs $20 an hour. At that rate, a full-time housewife is worth $113,568 a year.

But Australia has a curious rule of tort law: if a housewife is injured, there is no “economic loss” to her; if she loses her capacity for housework, her husband can claim compensation.

Divorce is another way of pricing a housewife — only then is a woman compensated for her contribution to the family. And that contribution is not the housework itself but how much work and working time her husband gained from it. On that calculation, a wife gets half the property.

All of it exposes a hard truth: a housewife’s work is valued by what it does for someone else.

Politics: Men Need Wives, Women Don’t Have One

To enter politics, a man must marry. What of women politicians? Their partners are rarely at home supporting their careers. A successful politician keeps hours unlike any ordinary household’s, and a political wife is indispensable to that. Women cannot marry a wife, and so find it far harder to work the way men do in politics.

A woman who wants to achieve anything in politics usually has to sacrifice her best childbearing years. The irony: people are prejudiced against the woman politician with no time for children, and denounce her for neglecting her family for work once she has a husband and children.

Male politicians are also criticised for not marrying — the assumption being that a male politician should be a father, should have a family, while keeping it at arm’s length. Women are different: they must mention their children now and then, discuss family matters constantly; the public watches whether they can do the job while caring for a family; and her husband is held to account for failing at his domestic duties.

To expect a woman in politics to do both jobs, to balance career, husband and children perfectly, is unreasonable. That impossible expectation paints women in politics as greedy and selfish. Men in politics carry no such expectation.

“How Do You Do It?”

People imagine that a successful woman must have it all. Ask them “how do you actually do it,” and the answer is usually simple and much the same: a husband at home, or relatives, or a nanny.

If it is the first, people exclaim: “How lucky you are, to have a husband who runs the home!”

But the question to ask is: why is the question asked at all? Why is it luck for a woman to have a husband willing to mind the children and do the housework? Why does nobody ask a man with a full-time housewife the same question?

“That arrangement isn’t luck. It ought to be normal.”

If a man and a woman “swap roles” at home, what they expect of each other changes too — a husband may refuse to iron, on the grounds of “losing his dignity as a man.” But the point of swapping is to do different work from the usual. It is hard for both; yet imagine if work and home expected exactly the same of men and women — the belief that “women should look after the children” would not be so deeply rooted.

In the end, it is the assumptions we start from that limit how we see the world, and those assumptions need not be fixed. Crabb offers an image: “This looks like a run of droughts; it needs a good soaking rain.”

Further reading: Marriage, a History shows that the male-breadwinner home was a short-lived invention of the 1950s; Why Men Love Bitches takes the other end of the same see-saw — women’s economic independence.