“He wouldn’t be where he is if I hadn’t sacrificed my career”

[BooFuckingHoo2]

I am expecting a flaming for this .

AIBU to think this is often untrue? I know many men with stay at home wives and kids who, in all honesty, whilst happy to have kids (because the wife does all the wifework) would probably have been equally happy with either no kids or extensive wraparound childcare and an equally high earning wife.

I often see it trotted out on here “I sacrificed my career to look after our children” - but the for the majority of women (aside from some exceptions e.g. husband working abroad) I’m sure it was a welcome choice and not something they were strong armed into. In my experience (unless childcare costs eclipse the wife’s salary) the husband is usually indifferent (aside from the wankers who want a trophy wife) as to whether the wife works or not.

Equally “he wouldn’t be where he is in his career if it wasn’t for me”. I’m sure there’s a small minority of women who’ve accelerated their husbands career but I think for most, they’d have been the same with or without their wife, although granted possibly with no children or higher childcare costs.

AIBU?

You are right of course.

‘Home standbys. On call. There's lots of jobs that require last minute notice.’

Yes I can see that would be true for doctors, surgeons etc but for people in ‘high flying’ office roles, no. I even know people in fashion design who have to travel a lot to visit factories, check out new materials, go on shoots etc and they still have sufficient notice for travel. They still manage to have both parents working.

The only people I know travelling lots with little notice are sales staff and engineers, not high flying office workers. The tech has been in place for some time which is why flipping to full time WFH when Covid came wasn’t a massive issue for those types of companies. It’s not the 90s people don’t need to jump on a plane to Japan the next morning to hold a meeting. Saying you must SAH because your DH constantly has to rush to the airport sounds like exaggeration to me.

@SantasBritchesSpelleas

You can have all the conversations you like, but sometimes the other person isn't being entirely honest with you or themselves

But in this scenario, why it is the mother who caves in when the father reneges on what he has promised?

Because the social condemnation for not putting the child(ren) first is enormous for women and negligible for men. Some of the power I had over my own life choices is because I was genuinely prepared to walk and leave DH holding the baby if the goal-posts moved too far. Few women will do that, because of some combination of hormones and socialisation and the way people react to fathers leaving versus mothers leaving. In the end, children need care, and women are more likely than men to prioritize that. A number of posters on this thread have talked about the benefits for their children of having a parent at home / working around school hours.

That is not something I'm proud of. It makes me a fairly unpleasant human being at bottom. But it meant I felt I had the same choices as a man would have, which is quite liberating.

I had a job like that. Had to go to Singapore at 1 days notice I was there 3 weeks got back Christmas Eve! Imagine doing that with kids! Was single at the time

I’m not saying ‘high flyers’ don’t travel, they do but it’s planned with sufficient notice involving PAs from both sides doing a lot of diary management, none of this 24hr notice stuff I keep seeing on here.

I do kind of do a bit of a hmm when people on here talk about their high flying DH who could be called to travel at 24hrs notice, which means they need a SAHP and think they can’t be the at high flying as in my experience that doesn’t happen as the top people have diaries sorted weeks and even months in advance and use tech in emergencies

Not always true. At present, of course, few people are travelling and use of video conferencing has gone up. But under normal circumstances, DH does sometimes need to go abroad at 1 days notice (UK director for an international company that supplies fresh produce to major supermarkets).

I have had to fly abroad for work over the years with a day or two's notice only actually. I earned more than my full time working husband but neither of us did better because of the other.

There was one divorce judgment where the wife gave up a career as a junior solicitor at Freshfields, I think it was where might have had potential to earn £1m a year and they put the husband's career first. Part of the money she got was for career sacrifice. The difficult issue is would she have been made a partner - male or female if you start in those firms the vast majority are never made a partner there.

I had a job involving a lot of travel (I don't now) and a PA would have been a luxury - public and third sector jobs have been cutting back admin support for years.

The trouble is the years when you're climbing the ladder, not when you get to the top - ironically, although I have a lot of responsibility now, I have more flexibility and control than I've ever had in any previous job. It's on the way up that you have to jump when you're told, and those years tend to coincide with having a family.

I think it is the case that some highly successful career men would have been in the same position had they not had kids. But I do think there is a certain circle of work (hopefully getting smaller) where many successful men will have got where they are partly from selling the “picture perfect” set up of a beautiful home with kids and a wife who would have been expected to host events and facilitate his networking.

There are also high earning career men who genuinely love their kids and so will be where they are as a result of their wife taking a backseat to keep their kids well looked after (whether through staying at home, or PT or turning down career advancement).

I have 3, 5 and under. DH and I both have good careers and have agreed our current set up. I turned down a promotion a couple of years ago as I couldn’t see how I could do the job without it impacting on the children. Sure we could have employed a nanny but I didn’t want to. DH offered to quit his job so I could take the promotion and work FT but I didn’t want that either.

Now I work 70% with only 2 days in the office and the rest WFH/off, DH works FT but insisted on 1 day WFH when taking the position. We share drop offs and pick ups between us, as well as appointments, activities, sickness. The kids get picked up at 3pm so we both spend a lot of time with them. We’re both super lucky that we have such flexible working arrangements.

I really think that more needs to be invested in flexible working where possible, not just for childcare, but so people can look after other family members or even just enjoy life outside of work. I really believe that if you employ the right people you should trust them to work flexibly and remotely.

DH and I have both been working from home 100% since March. Hopefully COVID will have made many firms realise they still get results when giving people flexibility. Perhaps this will be one good thing to come out of this year. Both of our firms are now looking at offering even more flexible working than before.

I do of course understand that there are many careers where such flexibility is not possible though.

Saying you must SAH because your DH constantly has to rush to the airport sounds like exaggeration to me

Because you don't and have never experienced that life. You can't comment on something you have never experienced.

Surely it depends on what each parent does for a living? I don’t know if we’d both be considered ‘high flyers’ - DH earns £77k and I earn around £160k - but we both have jobs where we’ve been able to put boundaries in place to ensure that one of us can do nursery drop off and pick up, and so that we both get to spend time with the children at breakfast, tea time, bath time and bedtime. Yes, there are times when DH is expected to be on calls late into the evening, but they are few and far between as we have both managed the expectations of our workplaces as working parents. He takes on 50% of kid and life admin, as he should. He also took 14 months of paternity leave with our DS, I took 4 months.

However, my DH is ex-army, and had he stayed in there’s no way that I could have worked as I do now. We’d have been moving all the time and he’d be on a moment’s notice to go somewhere or do something. In those circumstances, I could legitimately have said that I had sacrificed my career for his.

@Xenia

I have had to fly abroad for work over the years with a day or two's notice only actually. I earned more than my full time working husband but neither of us did better because of the other.

There was one divorce judgment where the wife gave up a career as a junior solicitor at Freshfields, I think it was where might have had potential to earn £1m a year and they put the husband's career first. Part of the money she got was for career sacrifice. The difficult issue is would she have been made a partner - male or female if you start in those firms the vast majority are never made a partner there.

Indeed many are never made partner and I understand the unwritten rule is that you have to do a stint abroad to even be considered. What happens then to the career of the trailing spouse.

What about those women who want to stay at home then? The most important thing to me when I had children was to bring them up myself. My DH is great but I wanted to be home with them. It seems we are not allowed to say this anymore. If I had wanted to work I could have done., I didn't want to.

It makes me a fairly unpleasant human being at bottom. But it meant I felt I had the same choices as a man would have, which is quite liberating.

Yet, no one would say that of a man who felt as you did. I don't think it makes you an unpleasant human. More women should have the strength to call men's bluff on this sort of thing.

@kritigirl - that’s the ops point. These women are staying at home because they want to. Which is fine but don’t act like your earning your oh salary as well.

@kritigirl

What about those women who want to stay at home then? The most important thing to me when I had children was to bring them up myself. My DH is great but I wanted to be home with them. It seems we are not allowed to say this anymore. If I had wanted to work I could have done., I didn't want to.

I don't think there's a problem with saying this. The OP is talking about women who say they made a sacrifice when they in fact made a welcome choice. You are being upfront about it being what you wanted to do - nothing wrong with that at all.

@YouJustDoYou i dont know much about 'top people' so you could be right. I certainky think there are more spouses facilitating lower paid jobs than high paid jobs. i do know plenty of jobs which require short notice travel, which earn good salaries for their field or just everday salaries. My friend keeps water flowing into peoples homes. Bad weather he treks out to manage teams of engineers for however long it takes at whatever time it is. Another friend is fire crew. There were heath fires here, he didnt come home for 5 days. Police are always getting annual leave cancelled. My nursing friend has been redeployed to a covid icu on totally different hours as she has specialist skills. My own DH is an engineer so he gets sent abroad to fix physical stuff. We got 4 hours notice once - he didnt refurn for 3 months I'd say to have a children in these fields requires a supportive spouse or family that can step in.. Its incredibly hard for single parents to do those types of roles as the salaries arent enough to pay for a nanny to be with your child 24 hours a day for 5 days with no notice.

Whether it is a choice to stay at home and look after DC without taking on paid labour or not, surely it means sacrificing professional opportunity and financial autonomy regardless. The person who is not staying at home is the breadwinner and the only way that a stay at home parent is financially secure is if the breadwinner provides or the law recognises that person’s contribution in the event of separation or divorce. So the hard practicality is that financial autonomy and professional opportunity are sacrificed, whether this is freely chosen or not. And domestic work and childcare should be valued as contributing to the overall prosperity of the household in the event of divorce.

I don't think there's a problem with saying this. The OP is talking about women who say they made a sacrifice when they in fact made a welcome choice. You are being upfront about it being what you wanted to do - nothing wrong with that at all.
I agree.

The OP isn't commenting on people being a SAHP. They are questioning whether all the people claiming that their DH would be nowhere without them, they sacrificed a career for the benefit of their DH, DH wouldn't have a good salary if it wasn't for them etc really did make huge sacrifices to the point that their DH couldn't function without them at home.

Some people rewrite a perfectly valid welcome choice as being this big sacrifice and then tey to convince themselves and others that the only reason their husband is successful is because they gave up a job that they didn't want to go back to anyway.

@Circumlocutious - dont see why you’re confused. I did mention that I think caring work is undervalued and that i pay my nanny fairly. Not sure how you got from that to me saying we “don’t need to worry about these women”.

I certainly valued my nanny and paid her fairly and treated her well. But she earned her own salary not half of mine (the reference here being to the claim that some sahm make that they effectively earn their dh salary by providing the childcare to “allow” him to do his job).

This thread is full of misinformation and misunderstanding.

Firstly, the gender pay gap is NOT a woman being paid less than a man for the same role. It’s the overall average pay of women within the company vs men. The reason why women are paid less than men overall is because of the number of men in senior positions (ie on the board) who are paid vastly more than women in entry level positions. There is a huge drive in the city to address this at the moment and that’s brilliant. It means that companies are more open and accountable to salaries and steps are being taken to ensure that women are given access to senior roles such as those on boards.

The other thing that strikes me on this thread is that people seem to believe that high flying careers are always of the “work late and travel” variety. I work in a corporate role at a senior level and culturally, it’s absolutely accepted and supported that people have children. Meetings don’t go on beyond 6 and pre-covid, men and women would leave at 4 / 4.30 / 5 to collect children. All my friends work in banking / law / insurance / finance etc and even though we all worked really hard and for long hours in our 20s, in our 30s no one I know works these ridiculous hours. Pre-covid, we could all comfortably meet for dinner at 6.30ish. Occasionally we all have to stay late for something but things have changed a lot, there isn’t any longer a culture of presenteeism like there used to be.

The one thing that covid has done well is show that flexible working is possible and encouraged. It isn’t necessary for women to feel like they need to shoulder the entire responsibility if men are also able and happy to share the load.

Someone up thread said they wondered why senior career women don’t have multiple children, I think the reason for that is that many women choose to build their career before having children, then run out of time and energy to have multiples. I worked to a level in my 20s, left it until my 30s to have children and realistically probably only will have 2 due to my age and the fact I have a career that I love and want to work at.

It seems a very sad situation that so many women do nothing of any sort of career, then have children and then have nothing to show for themselves when they children go to school. There need to be the opportunities for these women but there also has to be a shift to show young women that building a career before children is a sensible decision if they want to have a career after children.

Ha the chances of a woman being made partner were slim in my day my team 50 odd solicitors 50/50 men women 12 partners all men !🙄🙄🙄 At the firm you refer to Xenia! Hopefully things have changed think a woman at the helm now but still. Work for myself now lovely not having to deal with sexist prats and having my figure rated by old men

But surely in examples where the DH has the big job that isn't compatible with family life he's earning 6 figures

Not in lots of cases. When H was building his career in his industry and was doing the most hours and travelling (one year his company called him 6am Christmas morning to work all day and Boxing Day) he was on £60k. With a £500 commute per month cost, a £1500 mortgage, we had a 3 and a 1 year old. We would have needed a full time CM from 7-7 for me to go back to my previous job (which before the recession was £38k but after 3 redundancies the job I did ceased to exist and I was being turned down for similar roles on for £24k because I wasn’t qualified) and would also need £500 commute per month. It wasn’t a case of ‘chucking money at it’ there wouldn’t have been the money to chuck anywhere.

Of course it’s uneven and has now become a trap. H hates his job and hours but likes the lifestyle that comes with it. For him to drop hours he’d have to go on his own as a consultant which would require a massive cost which we don’t have. I’d have to earn £3k per month which I may do in 10 years when the kids are teens but not now. By then the childcare issue would be gone anyway.

The sahms I know we’re not highly paid enough for it to make financial sense or be able to pay for full time care. Their H’s all earn between 50-70k. When the kids start school they tend to do school hour jobs if they can.

All the women in Hs work over the last 10 years have been childless or gay with a sahm at home doing the traditional role. Most of the men have families and a sahm or are single/childless.

@Tellmetruth4

I’d love to know what jobs these high flying men do which require travel at extremely short notice? In Tech and Finance the high flyers tend to have a lot of notice regarding international travel. These trips are planned to the nth degree with PAs booking hotels, organising meeting itinerary etc. Any decisions which need to be made at short notice will be done at emergency board with people dialling in if they aren’t present. The tech for this has been there for years. Top level people are not forced to jet abroad with 2 days notice. They have too much to do and can’t rejig diaries that easily and as it’s their decision making and not physical skills which are required, a video call will suffice.

The only people I know who have to make unplanned trips are engineers and sales people. I’m just going by my personal experience.

Both DH and I have maintained FT jobs. We both do drop off and picks ups, have no family help and juggled it so we would only use wrap around care twice a week until Covid made us WFH full time so we got rid of that. We found that top employers in tech and finance offer attractive packages to attract good people so they offer flexible working, WFH etc as they are competing for people who can pick and choose where they will work. If our employers started telling us we couldn’t go to one of our kids dentists appointments or watch them in the nativity we’d first laugh then start looking to move.

I do kind of do a bit of a when people on here talk about their high flying DH who could be called to travel at 24hrs notice, which means they need a SAHP and think they can’t be the at high flying as in my experience that doesn’t happen as the top people have diaries sorted weeks and even months in advance and use tech in emergencies.

I completely agree with you @Tellmetruth4. All international travel in my experience is well planned in advance. Any last minute ad hoc trips would be very rare or done via video conference.

I wonder how much these “super travellers” actually need to go or if this is more misinformation on what a senior / high flying career actually entails.

@RosesAndHellebores what sector do you work in that’s got you back up to six figures? I need a career change!