The Wife Drought by Annabel Crabb
(Ebury Press)
Pp. 255
Annabel
Crabb is a political commentator, an author, journalist and television show
host. She examines the position of women in the workforce, the inequality of
wages, and the perception of parenting in this book, subtitled, ‘Why women need
wives, and men need lives’. While she makes some interesting points, all of her
examples are drawn from politicians, TV presenters, writers and journalists.
The debate is, therefore, heavily skewed towards middle-class professions,
making it not really typical of real life for most people.
There
is no question that women earn less than men on average, but the reasons for
this are less clear. Often women don’t get the higher-paid jobs because they
don’t have the experience – but how will they ever gain the experience if they
aren’t given the job? Part of the problem is perception. Because there are
currently more men in higher-paid positions, the trend is likely to continue. Another
part of the problem is that the emergent workforce doesn’t see it as a problem
at all, because it isn’t for them. Yet.
Firstly,
there is marriage; secondly (in this model, at least), there are children. Each
stage makes a difference to a person’s income and status. Until relatively
recently (October 1966), legislation forbad married women from working in the
public sector. Although things have changed, they are still fairly regressive
in the upper echelons of the pay scales. Of the 1192 senior executives (half
male; half female) who responded to a ‘Leaders in a Global Economy’ survey,
three-quarters of the men had a wife or spouse who didn’t work. Three-quarters
of the women had a husband who worked full-time. “The men got wives, in other
words. And the women didn’t.”
Having
a wife is considered an asset for a worker. Employers tend to see men with
wives as more reliable, and remunerate them accordingly. “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.”
Stage
two: children. “What proportion of nuclear families has a dad who works
full-time, and a mum who doesn’t? Sixty per cent. What proportion has a mum who
works full-time, with a male ‘wife’? Three per cent.” On the whole, due to earning
capacity and public perception, it is the man who goes to work and the woman
who remains at home. After all, “A mother who works is a ‘working mother’. A
father who works is just a normal guy.” Crabb argues that this situation must
change so that men leaving work to look after children has to become considered
as normal as women doing it.
Part
of the alpha-male culture which needs to change is that currently the man has to be seen
to be the major breadwinner. In this corporate world, men are expected to get
to the office early and leave late, and are told that weekends are for
families. This isn’t the point of this book, but what about people who work in
retail/hospitality – any job that isn’t a Monday-Friday; when are they meant to
spend time with their family?
The book is well-argued with many statistics, but it is pretty narrow in
its focus. Early on, Crabb states that she is going to boil all the arguments
down into two simple and broad categories – ‘Men are awful’ and ‘Women are
hopeless’ – and then address them. She proceeds to do so, but only those in a
particular demographic, which (while pertinent to anyone working in politics),
lessens the general nature of the argument.
