The Wife Drought

Annabel Crabb is a political journalist & commentator; author most recently of The Wife Drought. In her book she argues that working women are in an advanced, sustained, and chronically under-reported state of wife drought, and there is no sign of rain. She questions why the work-and-family debate is 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? To explore this further, Annabel Crabb addressed The Sydney Institute on Wednesday 28 January 2015. The paper which follows is an edited transcript of the speech given on the day.

THE WIFE DROUGHT

ANNABEL CRABB

Thank you very much Gerard. It’s a pleasure to be back.

Tonight I’m going to talk to you about housework, partly because I doubt that anyone one has addressed The Sydney Institute on that precise subject before and, if I’m honest with myself, partly because in a diabolical corner of my soul, I dream of, merely by broaching the subject of housework, inciting a dispute in the Henderson household about the dishes, that will lead to a truly infinite exchange of correspondence. I can then enter into the Turner Prize as my own creation. I’m always looking for ways to enrage Gerard. I toyed with the idea of being three minutes late this evening. I quickly discarded it on the grounds of unusual cruelty.

Let me explain first why I want to talk about housework. When we consider the issue of gender equality, talk almost immediately turns to the workforce. Why are there fewer female leaders than male, why are women 60 per cent of uni graduates, 45 per cent of middle managers but only 10 per cent of executives and only 1 to 2 per cent of CEOs depending on what Gale Kelly is doing at the exact time of calculation. Why are women underrepresented in federal politics and grievously under-represented in the cabinet. Mothers even more so I should say.

Men have been breeding like voles in the cabinet room for years and no one turns a hair. Christopher Pyne has four young children and Joe Hockey has three and nobody notices. But here’s a pop quiz for you. In what year did the mother of a pre-school aged child first serve in the Australian cabinet? Answer – 2007. That’s right, just seven years ago. Thank you Nicola Roxon.

When we consider these questions, the answers we come up with are all about the workplace. Maybe we should reform parliament to make it more polite. But this one always baffles me, both because I can’t see how you’d do it and also because I’m not sure that would actually serve as much of a chick magnet anyway. Maybe we should encourage women to network together/mentor each other/ lean in/ stick their necks out whilst leaning in, if possible.

When researchers look at workplaces and try to figure out why women fall through the cracks, they look at the workplace itself for clues. Is there a blokey culture? Do they have meetings on the golf course? Is there an unconscious bias in the way appointments are made? Do women get sidelined when they have kids or are sneakily made redundant whilst on maternity leave? Do they come back to work to find they’ve been assigned all the rubbish jobs and are now seated in the open plan area next to halitosis Joe from accounts?

The truth is that none of this stuff can possibly make sense until you look at what happens when the workday is over. When you join the spheres of work and home together. It happens less often than you think, but when it does happen, things become very clear.

Terrance Fitzsimmons, a University of Queensland researcher, authored a paper a few years ago looking at leadership among Australian CEOs. He interviewed about 30 male and 31 female CEOs and asked all the normal questions about career progression, leadership styles and so on, but he did something unusual too. He asked them how they organise their domestic lives and relationships. Here’s what he found. Of the 30 male CEOs he interviewed, 28 had children and all 28 of those had a stay at home wife. Of the 31 women he interviewed, only two had a stay at home husband. Of the women CEOs who had children, the two thirds of them who had children simply got to the point in their lives and careers where they realised it just wasn’t going to happen. Every single one of the CEOs who were mothers identified herself as the primary care giver of her children. Of his interviews with CEOs Fitzimmons observed, “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.

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

When I set out to write this book I went out on the hunt for statistics on the comparative rate of wife-having between men and women in Australia. If, as I suspected, having a wife – which I define as a spouse who either doesn’t work at all in the paid workforce or who works part time – is a secret weapon in the pursuit of a serious career, then it would be helpful to know the hard data of who has one and who doesn’t. Right?

The strangest thing was that I couldn’t find that figure anywhere. To me it seemed like a really big issue. If I had a buck for every time I heard a working mother say “You know what I really need is a wife” then I would be an extremely wealthy person. But I couldn’t find any statistics at all.

In the end I buttered up a clever lady from the Australian Institute for Family Studies and she applied her vast brain and swanky software to the 2011 census data. This is what she found. Of full time working fathers in Australia, 76 per cent have what I call a wife, which is to say a spouse that either does not work in the paid workforce at all or who works part time. This leaves some flexibility to get through all the tasks in a modern household which require flexibility, whether it be running children around, or being there for the waftily, non-specific window in which the plumber has promised to call.

However, among full time working mothers, the rate of wife having is grievously lower. Only 15 per cent of them have a spouse who works part time or not at all. What does this mean? Well, take two lawyers, at a big firm. One is a man, one is a woman. They each have two children, a busy job and ambition to succeed, be promoted and all the rest. They might be equally talented and equally ambitious, but the law of averages in Australia tells us that one of them is five times more likely than the other to have someone at home who can look after kids when they get sick, take Nana to her appointments, organise for the modem to be fixed, make sure there’s a present for the school friend whose birthday party it is tomorrow. And so on.

And if that doesn’t make a difference to the potential of each of these people to go the extra mile at work, to excel and flourish, then I would be extremely surprised. Housework is important, because, if you’re doing most of it, it does really and truly affect the way you function at work.

So let’s talk about housework. Let’s take the visible from space view first which delivers news that will not surprise you one bit. Women do more work in the home than men. This is true everywhere. Although, the phenomenon has different extremes in different countries. The country in which a randomly chosen female spouse has the best chance of a hand-with-the-washing-up is Norway where, according to the OECD, blokes put in three hours of domestic work a day as opposed to their wives who rack up three and a half. Yet in countries like Japan where the average bloke does just an hour of chores – cleaning, childcare and so on – home ticks along okay because his wife does five.

Australian women do an unusually high amount of housework and child care – five hours and eleven minutes a day according to the OECD figures, which is eleven minutes more than the Japanese lady for whom we were feeling sorry ten seconds ago. On the bright side, Mrs Australia isn’t married to Mr Japan, she’s married to Mr Australia instead, and he does nearly 3 hours work a day in the home. This is lots less than his wife, granted, but lots more than his brothers in Mexico, Korea or Italy.

One of the reasons that Australian men and women do more work in the home than their international counter parts is that we do not have a culture of low paid domestic service. In the United States, for example, both men and women do less housework than we do, but they are also much more likely to have a representative of a social underclass helping out. Domestic workers in the US are 94 per cent women, so it doesn’t mess with the gender statistics too much. But outsourcing housework brings in a lot of other variables, specifically race.

Domestic carers who are white, for instance, in the United States earn a median wage of $12.00 an hour. Black and Latino workers earn $10 an hour and Asians $8.33, on average, according to research done several years ago by the National Domestic Workers Alliance. On one hand it’s nice to see the American ladies getting cut some slack in the domestic department. On the other, it’s pretty awful that that slack gets taken up by workers whose pay rate depends at least in part on the colour of their skin.

Women do more housework than men do. This is the big picture everywhere. Across all of the countries of the OECD men average 141 minutes a day of work in the home and women average 273, twice as much basically. Now the last 50 years have brought about extraordinary changes for women. At the beginning of the 1970s about 40 per cent of women worked and now that’s up around 60 per cent. This movement of women into the workplace is considerable but it has not been counterbalanced by men moving in the opposite direction. And women did not decrease their overall contribution to the housework to reflect the other jobs that are taken on; they just add it to the portfolio.

In fact, between 1992 and 2006 for example, women increased the time they spent on child care by nearly 20 per cent. In the United States, where time use data is available going back to the 1970s, it’s reported the average full time working mother in America today spends more hours per week in intensive one-on-one play with her child than her mother did with her in the 1970s, even where her mother did no paid work at all.

Defenders of the traditional breadwinner/homemaker model argue that the lopsided distribution of paid and unpaid work within a couple makes economic sense. This is the system called exchange bargaining in which one person, commonly the husband, earns money and supports another person, usually the wife, who in return agrees to take responsibility for bathroom grout and the Easter bonnet parade and all the rest of it. And there certainly are appealing aspects to this arrangement. Nobody is doubling up on tasks too much, and there’s a fairly clear rule of thumb as to who does what. And it’s true that if you add up the total number of hours that everybody’s worked, including paid and unpaid work the total number of hours done by men and women in couple families tend to be about the same.

In the traditional family structure, the man will take care of earning the income plus lawn mowing plus the removal of certain crawling pests, and it will all add up to the same amount of time as the female is spending on cooking, cleaning and child care.

What’s really interesting, though, is what happens in those families when circumstances change. What happens in the circumstances when women move into paid work and men move out of it? If the exchange bargaining model is to be believed, everybody should swap round tasks so things stay roughly even, right? But that’s not what happens.

According to the Australian time-use data, men do on average between 15 and 20 hours of housework a week. No matter whether they work full time, part time or not at all. Men who are not in the labour force at all do about 20 hours of housework. Part time working men do about 15 hours and full time working men do an average of 16. Why do men who work full time do slightly more housework than men working part time? I do not know.

Women, however, are a completely different story. A stay at home wife with a working husband does on average 42 hours of housework a week. That is, as the numerate among you will instantly have discerned, more than twice as much as even a man who does no paid work at all. But as she takes on more hours of paid work, a woman will ease back on the housework. A woman who works full time does on average just 25 hours of domestic work. Still more work than the average non employed man but a whole lot less than a non-employed woman.

Men seem to be governed by an invisible National Domestic Award System. An average Australian man will do an average of 20 hours a week if he works full-time, or if he works part-time. Or if he doesn’t work at all. Or if his wife is at home, or if she isn’t. In fact there are only a handful of life events that change the amount of housework that men do to a significant or broadly observed degree.

Moving out of home is one of them. A man aged between 20 and 49 who moves out of his parents home to live either alone or in a share household dramatically increases the time he spends cooking and shopping. Another is divorce. According to Janine Baxter, a leading academic in this field who analysed data from a survey project of several thousand Australians called Negotiating The Life Course, divorce immediately adds about 10 hours a week to a man’s domestic workload.

Divorce means something quite different for women, however, who do about six hours less a week after divorcing their husbands. And what about the arrival of children? Surely all that extra washing and sterilising and shopping for nappies and childproofing the house and so on must make a difference to the domestic workload. Baxter’s research found that the birth of a first child jacked up a woman’s house workload considerably. She did half as much again after her first child’s birth and more again after the birth of a second child. The birth of a first child, however, generates negligible extra housework for men.

The arrival of a further child after that actually reduces the amount of time the supplier of its Y chromosome spends doing housework. Baxter, puzzled, advances two theories. She says that it may be that additional children help to cement an already traditional division of labour in many households. Or it may be that additional children lead men to increase their hours of paid work in order to compensate for the increased expenditure associated with more children, or to compensate for their wives reduced time in paid labour. Indeed while women step back from paid work when they give birth to their first child, new fathers tend to increase their work rate outside the home. Men increase their working week by about four and a half hours on average when their first child is born. So women shrink their housework hours when they work full time, increase them when they have children and respond rather elastically, in other words, to all the changes life can bring. Men pretty much keep doing what they’re doing.

Now let’s have a quick look at the busiest households of all, which are the ones with children aged under 15 years. Households with a dad and mum and kids are remarkably predictable. 90 per cent of the dads work, the majority of them full time. They are at work for a towering average of 52 hours a week. They do, you guessed it, around 20 hours of housework a week. These guys will continue to do around 20 hours no matter what happens. The mums’ patterns are quite different.

A stay at home mother with a full time spouse will typically do about 65 hours of housework a week once you include childcare. When she moves into part time work she drops that back to 50 hours, when she works full time she’ll drop it again to 41 hours. That is a whole 24 hours worth of housework that she will chop out of the week to make room for paid work. What happens to that day’s worth of work? Because the dads don’t change their habits much in response, on average they will respond by increasing their domestic workload by 35 minutes a week.

There’s another factor that has an even more intriguing effect on division of labour in the Australian home and that is share of earnings. The question of who earns more, in other words. The historical male bread winner model assumes that men will earn all of the household income and women will do almost all of the housework. We’ve just seen what happens when a woman increases her hours of paid work – she does much less housework and her husband counters by doing a little bit more.

When you look at how women change their behaviour according to how much they earn, instead of how many hours of paid work they do, you notice something absolutely fascinating. Baxter and Belinda Hewitt in their 2012 paper – Negotiating Domestic Labour: Women’s Earning and Housework Time in Australia – analysed information from Australian households. They specifically looked at the pattern of women’s housework plotted against their contribution to the household’s total weekly earnings. They looked at women in couple families only. No one would be surprised to learn that single mothers do all the housework in their homes.

Here’s what they found: On average, women do 17 minutes less housework a week for every one per cent extra they contribute to the household budget. So if a husband earns $99,000 and his wife goes out and gets a casual job that pays $1000, she will knock 17 minutes off her weekly household housework load. Another one per cent of contribution ensures a further 17 further minutes of work around the house and so on. This so far is a rather beautiful demonstration of bargaining theory. Paid work is exchangeable for unpaid work, if you do more of one you’ll do less of the other.

This pattern holds only until the woman’s contribution reaches 66.6 per cent of total household income. Once she starts earning more than that, which is to say she becomes clearly the principal bread winner of the home, she starts increasing her housework load again. Once the woman is firmly established as the family’s breadwinner she starts behaving in exactly the opposite manner from what the bargaining model would predict.

As the female breadwinner earns more from paid work she resumes more and more work around the house. This is a pattern that is unique to Australia. The researchers twisted and turned and put in and took out factors to try and work out if this wasn’t some sort of glitch in the calculation. But it held true and distinguished Australia from all sorts of other countries. That’s quite weird. Why would a woman making a bigger contribution to the paid work in any given household also feel obliged to increase the amount of unpaid work she does at the same time. And why does 66.6 per cent serve as the trigger point for everything in the household suddenly to change?

The explanation, the only one available really, is that in Australia our expectations about who will probably be the breadwinner and who will probably be the homemaker are still deeply set and powerful. When a woman trips that up by earning more than her husband, she will often seek to compensate for that in other ways. Hanging onto more of the housework, for example. And here’s what we know about attitudes, again taken from Baxter’s research.

Australians were asked, over the decades, to agree or disagree with this statement” “It is better for the family if the husband is the primary breadwinner outside the home and the wife has primary responsibility for the home and the children.” In 1986, 56 per cent of men agreed with this proposition, by 2001 it had gone down to 30 per cent. But by 2005 it bounced right back up again to 41 per cent of men agreeing with that proposition. Similarly, among women, in 1986 33 per cent of us agreed that it was better for everyone if we stayed home; by 2001 that was down to 19 per cent, but by 2005. Instinct tells us that attitudes have been modernising steadily over the past few decades. The reality is that we’re more conservative than we think on family life.

So, back to housework. Why does it remain such a female domain? One thing we don’t talk about all that much because it interferes with the equality argument is that men and women often have differing ideas about constitutes an acceptable degree of cleanliness in an average home. New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait, a writer and home dad in 2013, confronted this situation rather boldly in his essay entitled, “A Really Easy Answer to the Feminist Housework problem’”.

Here’s what he wrote: “Viewing housework inequality as entirely a phenomenon of exploitative men free riding off of female domestic labour makes sense only if you think men derive equal enjoyment from a cleaner and neater home.” The assumption of most of the feminist commentary surrounding household chores assumes that there is a correct level of cleanliness in a heterosexual relationship and that that level is determined by the female.

A little cultural relativism would improve the debate. Chait himself, by way of declaring his stakeholder interest in this matter, disclosed that in college he had lived “in a group house with newspapers for carpeting and pizza boxes stacked to the ceiling”. Since marriage, though, he and his wife have settled on a standard, a bit neater than he would keep it and a bit messier than she would ideally like.

The Canadian writer, Steven Marsh enlarges on the theme in a recent New York Times piece rather excitingly entitled “The case for filth” in which he too agitates the grime. The ancient Romans would have found Renaissance Europeans disgusting beyond belief, as their Muslim contemporaries did, and certainly my grandmother would find my house filthy, Marsh argues. The standards have changed. There exists no agreed-upon definition of what has to be done in a household.

The solution to housework wars is not only clear but refreshingly easy in Marsh’s view. Housework is perhaps the only political problem in which doing less and not caring are the solution. Marsh writes. Fifty years ago it was perfectly normal to iron sheets and to vacuum drapes, they were necessary tasks. The solution to the inequality of dusting wasn’t dividing the dusting it was not doing the dusting at all.

Now there is one final cultural barrier that tends to keep the genders on either side of the housework divide – it’s about competence and perceptions of competence. In the workplace anti-discrimination laws forbid a man to stand up and say, “You know what, women make really bad accountants”. But there is nothing preventing a women, and indeed this happens every day, from saying to her friends at the school gate, never trust a man to do the laundry.

The Mere Male column in New Idea Magazine has been going for 65 years. The theme involves women writing in with their favourite stories about how rubbish their husbands are at basic household tasks has remained unchanged over that time and they still get plenty of traffic. A vast slice of the output of the advertising industry is predicated on the assumption that men are inadequate at housework. Fumbling dads who don’t know how to put nappies on, or cannot be relied upon to boil an egg are an advertising staple and this is because while incompetence in the domestic sphere for a woman is a source of shame, for a man it is thought adorable and entirely natural.

In the four series of Kitchen Cabinet I’ve met only one person who has really steadfastly refused to be a guest and that’s Julia Gillard. Her reason is that she is not a cook and would feel awkward even vaguely pretending that she was. To be honest I understand her reservations given the national uproar that ensued when she was inadvertently photographed next to an empty fruit bowl. Can you imagine the reaction had she ruined an entire meal on camera. Yet, barely any mention is made when Joe Hockey, a generous and charming host I hasten to note, steps into his own kitchen on camera and is generally flummoxed when asked to locate the knife drawer.

Personally, I find housework boring. I am very much in my own life component of the controlled filth approach, but the significance of housework I find fascinating. What shapes our lives at home cannot help but shape our lives at work. It is impossible to understand the latter until you understand the former. I hope for this reason you will forgive me for spending this entire half hour moaning about the housework.