AIBU to think many women put themselves in a bad financial position?

[Sunflowers095]

So there's a lot of talk about the gender pay gap and also how women have been more affected by the pandemic and had to take on more caring responsibilities. While I understand there are single parents etc. in most situations what I don't understand is:

• why don't women go for higher paying careers or marry lower earning men, therefore being the main breadwinner
• why don't women choose partners who will take on 50% of caring responsibilities, chores, etc. rather than have kids with someone who doesn't contribute and just put up with it?

Another thing I see often is women deciding to be SAHM, come back part time, extend maternity leave. Nothing wrong with this choice but in the context of a career surely it's not the best way to support that goal? Especially when many SAHM say that they decided to stay at home because their wage would barely cover childcare. That's not the point! Long term it increases the earning potential if a woman stays in work.

While I agree that a lot of inequality still exists I feel like many people make conscious choices that make their financial situation worse. Women I know who decided to take shared parental leave, go back to work full time, make their partner take on equal responsibility etc have all had great careers. Am I missing something in this conversation?

I'm not trying to be judgemental in any way towards non career driven women or women who want to be homemakers as I think it's great people have a choice and being a SAHM is an important job! I just mean purely from a financial/career perspective here.

I think there are different stages to life. I'm currently in the stage where I am a sahm and we live in a house with little precious or expensive items. We do not have lots of money but we have enough to survive and I get to have lots of time with my children. At the next stage, i'll go back to work full time, will have lots of money but ds will both be in school.

SciFiScream you’re right that it’s importnat not to put up with things. I didn’t put up with things either (hence now divorced), in fact before the penny dropped that he was being abusive we were going to marriage counselling and he told the counsellor that “the problem is that she is a feminist” 😂 Funnily enough the (female) counsellor did not agree that this was why our marriage was in trouble! But it’s important to understand that the same technique of not taking any shit will play out differently with an abusive misogynist than with a decent man and it’s honestly not always easy to telll the difference, particularly as a younger woman.

I laugh but it was pretty shocking at the time especially as he had described himself to me as being a feminist himself pre marriage 🙄

I love the fact that I’ve been able to waft about. Working part time, looking after my child, riding my horse, walking my dogs, meeting friends, volunteering.

Sheesh. Who wants to be a wage slave?

I think there are a lot of things that combine to put women in a position where a lot more of them are likely to be in positions that make it harder for them to earn as much.

Children are the main reason. Women without children aren't at nearly as much disadvantage, financially, as women with children. Parenting is a huge transfer of wealth from, mainly, mothers, to the rest of society.

The pressure on women to have children is much greater than on men. Structurally and biologically the onus is on women to ensure children's needs are met. At the extreme end, only women will ever find themselves in the position of deciding whether to go through with an unplanned pregnancy alone or have an abortion, and while that's extreme, it's not that uncommon. Mothers also still have to put up with prejudice from employers that means when they give their career the same priority as a father, the fact they have children will lead some managers to offer them less money and give them less opportunities, including avoiding hiring them at all. That makes prioritising career a less good investment for mothers and so discourages it. Even when a couple together see the fairness in splitting responsibility for children evenly, there are still structural issues that can make that more difficult and that skew towards women being the carer - the way maternity leave has been structured for decades has made women the default in infant years. The fact people tend to marry with an age difference that makes the man most likely to be earning the most when children come also helps skew decision making in those early years when childcare is so expensive. And the patterns and inequalities built up then often continue long after the hands on care needs are more manageable for a dual career household.

There's also the pressure on women to be the main carer if they split up with the father of their children. Lots of men and women assume the children will do one night a week and every other weekend with the father as a starting point. The idea that a woman might see her kids that little while she built her career back up (and let the father struggle with childcare) would be met with a huge amount of outrage on a site like MN and pressure from family and friends will likely be similarly damning. That sort of social pressure is hugely powerful.

Our culture pushes women to think and be concerned about children far more than it pushes men - that one of the few forums on the Internet that is dominated by female voices happens to be a parenting forum is no coincidence. Men don't have the same social pressure to talk about, or think about, or feel responsible for kids. And so they are less knowledgeable about what kids need and less proactive about meeting those needs and that means women tend to pick up the slack. (I think there is even more here about social pressure on women to 'perform' a sort of motherhood that is often unnecessary or even mildly harmful in order to demonstrate their worth in a domain that society is happy to allow them to excel in).

There's been quite a bit of economics research in the last decade that has fairly firmly shown the main reason for the financial gap between men and women is children.

I out earn my husband by about 3x. And always have. He left about 5 years ago. He is asking for alimony of about $1800 a month. That's about 1/3 of my take home pay. Even though all three kids live with me fulltime. Two of the kids are adults, so the court won't consider supporting them as an obligation that I have. But somehow I'm expected to support a 47-year-old man who left me. So, marrying a lower earning man didn't do me any favors.

It doesn’t have to be like that. I’m bloody proud I break the mould and I wouldn’t stand for a partner who doesn’t as well. The only way to change this, as far as I’m concerned is lead by example. I don’t realise how rare this is though by the sounds of mumsnet!

I earn more than DH, just so happens my industry pays more. We both work part time and we split all childcare down the line. In fact outside lockdown, he does slightly more. We share the chores, mental load and work to our strengths on housework/running our and the kids’ lives. It’s a true partnership, they are his kids as much as mine.

Because people who think these decisions are black and white are the reason inequalities and assumptions exist in the first place.

I can give you a personal view. I’m early 30s, well paid (£125k plus bonus), work for a company that’s incredibly competitive to get into. My DH and I met at uni and except when he was doing his phd have always earnt almost exactly the same. But I’m about to go on maternity leave and I want to take a whole year off because I find work stressful, tiring, and a chore. He loves his work, is incredibly ambitious, and defines himself by it. He will take a month of shared leave after I go back because I don’t want to become the default parent but I will definitely go back part time if I go back at all. I’m just not as ambitious as him, don’t enjoy work that much, and would much rather be at home with my child. So I’m very torn between doing the financially sensible thing and doing what I actually want to do, which is put work on the back burner or give it up all together.

Since having my children I have gone part-time, my monthly take home pay has dropped by about £800 a month and on two occasions I believe me being part time and working family friendly hours has cost me a promotion.

However, I wouldn’t change that if it meant being away from my children a lot.

Yes I may have put myself in a worse financial position but my children are my priority and the financial ‘hit’ I have taken and the job opportunities I have missed out on, are not important in comparison.

The trick is to find a partner who doesn’t think going 50/50 (or more) with childcare and housework is beneath them and who sees you and your career as equal. It probably requires 2 high earners to have this dynamic - you just wouldn’t get it if one earned less than the other.

Seniority also provides built in flexibility to an extent. Work from home, being home based and only going to the office for meetings, the ability to work across different timezones - it all facilitates full time working alongside effective parenting.

I would rather continue to work full time with DS than p/t because I find with pt colleagues that due to our workloads they end up having to work their days off anyway. They just take a paycut to do that.

This is an interesting thread, especially as I was coincidentally discussing the gender pay gap /gender pension gap with my husband.
We met at university (postgraduate) and we've been on pretty similar full-time incomes as we've moved up the career ladder. I went back to work full-time after my 2 periods of maternity leave because I wanted to not only maintain my career but also wanted to protect myself (and children) financially in case anything changes in the future. My mum was a SAHM until I was 8 and then worked part-time until she retired. I saw (and still see) how she is financially dependent on my dad and how he likes to remind her of this. I vowed to not end up in my mum's predicament and so far so good but I'm acutely aware from friends/family experiences that situations can rapidly change.

I could give you an example OP.

My husband and I worked in the same industry - I made less as he had been there a good deal longer. But also to the point, he basically liked the job and found it fulfilling, and I didn't.

After our eldest was born I realised that I was not keen to put her in care at a year old. With work and commute, we'd have had very little time to see her at all - she'd have spent more hours in care than awake with us. It was simply unacceptable to me.

So I stayed home. I wasn't unhappy to get out of my job and was still breastfeeding. When we had other kids it made even less sense to go back FT.

Over the years I've raised my kids, take in some others for pay, done some other PT work, we've had the flexibility for my dh to take jobs that were inflexible including one where he wasn't home six months of the year. I appreciate that I ca spend time with the kids, cook real food, keep a garden, work in the community in several volunteer roles which I think are important. I've been able to adapt when the kids needed extra help or when parents have been ill, and our family life can still function.

We have some good insurance if dh kicks the bucket. But we live very modestly compared to many of dh's workmates. And maybe one things will go wrong day I'll have to tell a less exciting job and live in an flat - I can live with that possibility.

I think a huge part of this issue is plain old biology. As women are the only sex that can have children this often places them at a financial disadvantage. Women who do not have children do not see their career suffer in the same way.

You simply cannot equalise everything. Women generally need longer parental leave to physically recover from birth, breastfeed etc. And I know it’s not very popular these days to say this but women who have given birth, for a whole host of hormonal reasons are more in tune to their babies waking at night, emotional cues and are often far less inclined to leave them all day to go to work than a man. I’ve lost count of the times over the years I’ve heard women say they cried as they left their children at nursery when they headed back to work. Never, ever heard a man express any guilt or worry about it.

All mammals have clear sex based behaviours in relation to raising young and as much as we humans like to think we are different, we are not. I know how unpopular this view is these days but I think regardless of whether or not laws are changed, structures and barriers are altered to make things more equal in the work place etc, for women who choose to have children, a higher proportion of them than men who have children, will actively choose caring for them over their career.

In summary, I believe it’s biology and women’s stronger connection in GENERAL, to their children that drives these decisions. Women who are child free do not, as a whole, have the same financial disadvantages.

Excellent post @BoomBoomsCousin and I wholeheartedly agree which I’ve echoed in my post. I read yours afterwards and realised you’ve put it a lot more eloquently than me.

There are so so many systemic barriers that women face that men don't. Those barriers keep them from being able to make the decisions they want/need often.

Having said that...

I've seen a few friends who are University educated, middle class (with options!), choose to have kids with men they had many doubts about. After children they cut their hours so so much, despite the option to work more. One friend's parents offered to pay nursery fees and did, yet despite husband being a lifelong student (literally - 2 degrees, 2 masters, now PhD, lives off stipends, doesn't work) chose to cut her work hours down to 10/hours a week after her year off on maternity leave. During the start of covid, with her one dc now age 6 and as she's a keyworker could access school full time, she was offered an amazing promotion which would have meant her working a minimum of 14 hours and a significant pay raise. She turned it down. Presented it to me that as a Mum it's so hard to work 10 hours/week?! FWIT I am a single parent and work full time and have more than one job. Her one dc is in school full time and friend works 2x 5 hour days. What do you know, her husband isn't getting on well with his course and has taken leave. I don't see why she has made the choices she has, she had so many other options.

Another friend has 2 dc and they are not only in school full time ages 11 and 8, but she's now divorced the man she admits she knew she shouldn't marry and he has them after school from 3-6. So she drops them off before 9 and they aren't home until 6 pm. Yet she works 1.5 days as a teacher. She has been offered more so so many times, and turns it down again citing motherhood. Always saying it's impossible to work more when you are solely responsible for your dc. Yet not only does her ex have them M-F from 3-6, he also has them every other Saturday all day. Friend makes up the income difference with UC and never ever stops with the snide/jealous comments towards others that have more. When I say more, I mean hard working people who are working 35/40 hours a week as nurses, teachers and midwives who can do things like book a holiday or save to get their garden done with nice landscaping. Yet she's a qualified teacher who could be earning a very very decent wage, even if she went 3/4 days/week which she's been offered, and has free childcare so no costs to her either.

The only thing I will say is both knew they could make up their income through credits and both have parents who have large detached homes worth about 800k. I do wonder if it has meant they've made different choices as a result. Both also are set to inherit from childless aunties who have homes worth 400-500k. Perhaps that has allowed for some poor decision making or not working harder to get themselves in better financial positions, because they know even if their parents end up in care homes, they stand to have a lot of money in inheritance. It's also clear both sets of parents have ample savings though I have no clue how much. I only know the value of the parents homes as we live in the same area.

So while I 100% believe as women we have so many barriers to economic well-being and there are structural inequalities related to caregiving and gender, I also think some people for whatever reason just don't prioritize fiscal responsibilities. I'd say the same about both their male partners though. The latter is not a woman thing. Some people are very much live for now, if we don't earn x we can get y. Personally I think it's a balance. I say that as someone who could receive disability supports and stay at home, but I work more than full time and like what I'm modeling for my dc. I will always vote for a government that supports helping people who can't work, I believe people shouldn't live in poverty, and that no child should go hungry. I would rather people abuse a system than not have a system of support. But I also find it distasteful that people choose to work less and get credits/top ups rather than work hours they could work and pay their way. Especially since there really isn't enough to go around. The cuts are dangerous and harm people and there are people who don't have options. I wish we could do more for them, but there just isn't enough.

Lots of reasons and problems. It’s a whole societal thing.

I’ve had a well-paid career and juggled with kids but the hours are a huge problem - seniority expects very long days and a commute and then you miss out on seeing your family. Generally men appear less bothered about that than women because usually childcare still defaults to mums - and they have wives at home. So then women may work flexibly or part-time and miss out on promotion. It’s happened to me because it was impossible to be there for my kids and do the hours and in the end the kids come first.

Some female-dominated careers are also poorly paid and this is because way back women were expected to live off their husbands and just get a bit of “pin money” and the salary scale still seems to reflect that view. Nursing, for example, should surely be much better paid than it is.

I had a lower-earning husband. I wouldn’t recommend! He had a professional job but didn’t exactly push for promotion because he saw me as a cash cow. He did more than some men at home but put in minimal effort while I was going mad working so hard and really doing almost everything.

We are now divorced and he waltzed off with 55% of the “pot” - 70% earned by me. The kids (young adult and teen) are entirely dependent on me. He pays minimal child support but that’s just refunding the money I gave him. So whether you work or SAHM it’s all a rip-off and grossly unfair. No U.K. court apparently wants to look at the “detail” of a marriage so how could I prove that I had contributed more?

Marriage is a terrible decision for wives with careers, unless your hubby has an even better career - so again we are defined by the man we marry and nothing else. So much for breaking the mold. At least my kids love me.

The whole bloody issue boils down to the fact that there is inequality. Inequality in earnings, in treatment in the workplace, in allocation of household duties, in education of boys as to what needs to be done and how to do it, in expectation, in attitude, in employment rights. The list is endless.
If we had more true equality, people (men and women) would be able to confidently make the choices they want to and that work for them and their families without the fear of being exploited and/or left destitute by a bastard who casually follows his dick to another woman a few years later. And we'd have fewer entitled men to choose from because they'd know how to respect us by acting in true partnership in all family matters - and in the workplace.

Until we (start to) fix education, societal attitudes and legal rights and offer proper, quality childcare at affordable prices (ie state provided ) then we will still be having this debate in 40 years. The feminist agenda has been diluted and suppressed over the last few years, with the focus on the trans agenda, rather than the wider systemic issue 50% of the population lives with - and suffers from - every single day (trans stuff needs addressing but not to the exclusion of the majority). I'm sorry to say that unless we make these issues a priority by protesting shouting , campaigning (and raising our kids properly) , nothing will change. The men won't change it because it doesn't affect them as much.

I've spent a lifetime carving a very successful career in a male dominated world, as the major breadwinner, whilst my bloody wonderful DH has been SAHD and looks after our kids. But it's been hard. I've missed a lot. I had to turn Into a bloke to compete and stay the course, never showing vulnerability or that I had kids, working whilst ill so as not to be seen to be weak. Bullshit macho values, and trying to change and influence these from within. And here I am, towards the end of my career being picked on again at work, by men for having the audacity to be more successful than them. I chose this path as I wanted to prove myself (to me mostly) , and offer a good life to my family but there have been times when I've almost abandoned it .

As a PP said upthread please don't blame the women for putting themselves in the vulnerable situation, or for choosing the 'wrong' man. Actually there is no point in blaming anyone, it's not that simple, but we must unite as a society, men and women to start to make meaningful lasting change for the benefit of all.

Rant over.

(Can you tell it's been a shitty, stressful week at work with them menz ?).

There is a lot of different issues here

1. what do you determine to be an overall indicator of a successful life? Having earned £££s in a successful career or having spent time with your family? For some people they are motivated by career and financial reward and others it is their work/life balance. Neither is wrong, but not sure you can have both, even men cannot have both.

2. inherent sexism and the persistent glass ceiling. I do really think there needs to be a female workers union. Most unions are controlled by men.

3. Some women making poor financial and relationship decisions. And by that I don’t mean making sure your man will do 50/50 around the home. I mean making sure you are married before having children, making sure you both have full and honest disclosure of all finances and joint accounts wherever possible. You also need a contingency plan in case you end up a single parent, this doesn’t even have to be because of divorce if you are unmarried and your dp gets killed in a car accident you are even more up shit creek than if you were married. Likewise men ought to think about this too, life will not always be fluffy bunnies and roses just because you fell in love and decided to have a baby. If your spouse turns out to be a twat operate plan B.

4. A lot of women having zero self-worth and esteem who will put up with whatever emotionally abusive behaviour that is given to them, because they identify their worth based upon their relationship status.

We have more control of 3&4. No one really knows how they will feel about issue 1 until the baby arrives. Issue 2 is hardest of all to overcome.

In my personal circumstances I married a man who is 15 years older and whose career had peaked by the time I married him. He was not having to do all the ‘young persons’ networking and working long, long hours and he wanted to be able to step back a bit and get involved in a family. He took 6 months paternity leave. Unfortunately I was hit with issue 2. Now I’m retraining and I know he will support me.

I do genuinely think you cannot remain independent within a marriage, you cannot have one foot in the door and also have a selfish attitude to making sure you do better out of life than your spouse. I see a lot of men try to engineer this, what happens is that the women don’t put up with it and they leave them and suddenly they lose their family and status as a successful male. They either get bitter and twisted or they learn from their mistakes. So we should be teaching our sons all of this too.

@PicsInRed

Women in workplace are subject to misogyny, sexual harassment and general bullying, directly due to being women, combined with an excessive burden of domestic responsibilities societal expectations ...eventually women burn out and/or give up. They settle for making the bills rather than advancement or end up choose a domestic role they perhaps wouldn't otherwise have chosen.

Women don't choose mediocrity, the structure of our society funnels them directly into it.

Women don’t choose mediocrity in their careers I hope you mean!

I saw a great line today - ‘your partner is often your glass ceiling’, it’s very true.

Whilst we no doubt face discrimination in ways that men don't (especially around maternity and the favouring of men over women of child bearing age) I think a big part is also how our society judges men on their financial success in a way that it doesn't to women.

Whilst the majority of women want to 'marry upwards' men will always be incentivised to be high earners.

Because I wanted to have children and I want to be around for them, and my part time job allows me to have the best of both worlds.
IMO children value your time far more so than an expensive holiday or anything else that one can afford in a high-earning role.

I disagree that being married protects women. It doesn’t if you have a decent career. It’s a danger! I had to pay my ex to go away and now have to pay the costs of l housing and feeding my kids! He was delighted to say this is “equality”.