This idea that women need to get married for financial protection is bizarre

[NewFem]

I’ve encountered this view so many times here and it doesn’t make any amount of sense to me. Can someone please explain this to me how it applies to modern life?

Girls go to school and receive the exact same quality of education that boys do.
Girls, I read outperform boys in SATs, GCSEs and at A-level.
Girls attend university at higher rates than boys do, across most ethnicities in the UK.
Girls outnumber boys in highly paid professions like medicine.
Girls also study science, technology, engineering and maths subjects at university in increasing numbers.

Women are perfectly capable of being educated, having a high salary and making a living for themselves. I know plenty of women who are homeowners by themselves and manage to buy a house individually with no help. So why is there still this idea that we need men for financial security. It doesn’t make sense.

When it comes to children and childbirth, most women don’t give up their careers so protection doesn’t apply to them either. I looked this up, in 2019, 75.1% of mothers in the UK were in work. In 2020, 71.8% of mothers in the UK were in work.

In 2019, only 28.5% of mothers with children below 14 years old reduced their working hours to accommodate childcare. This means most women (71.5%) did not reduce or limit their working hours. So it isn’t true for the majority of mothers that most women give up working after they’ve had children or that a man’s career remains unaffected and a woman’s career declines because of childcare. Therefore we need marriage to have protection.

At least this is my opinion based on data and my own life experiences. Open to hear other points of view though

I think the OP has had a hard time on this thread and I can understand why as the poster above noted.

There are a huge number of reasons why the system is stacked against women achieving at parity with men: most of them connected with childcare and the way it limits women's career advancement (and the associated reluctance of most men to step up and play their part here). It is naïve to assume that marriage has no part to play in this socitey.

But the OP's position is a utopian one and in a way she's correct. If women really were able to achieve at total parity men, if men did actually do their fair share of domestic labour, if we had subsidised childcare and proper elderly care, if stereotypes about how women should behave and what roles they should occupy in society disappeared then in theory marriage should not be necessary.

I've always seen marriage as a very necessary evil but an evil nonetheless. It's an odd paradox because in practice it protects a great many women from being exploited or neglected by men so fulfils a useful function. But fundamentally it also entrenches stereotypes about the role of the sexes in society by perpetuating the idea of how the family should function. So at its base it is fundamentally a sexist institution. The fact that it is very useful doesn't take away from that.

I would personally love to get to a place where marriage was completely redundant. If my daughter ever becomes involved with a man who earns more than her I would be strongly urging her to make sure she is married before having children. But I'd much rather she was never in the position of needing to do that in the first place.

That advice is generally given to SAHP or those in similar vulnerable situations, not to all women, and mainly because there is a misconception that it's "just a piece of paper" until there is a problem when it's often too late to get in any other protective options.

Everyone has to look at their own situations and decide how they want to balance the risks and responsibilities. Marriage and civil partnership gives greater legal and financial protection compared to cohabitating (along with some other reduced risks in certain areas, at least statistically), but comes with greater legal responsibilities and risks particularly if separating. Like everything in life, it has risks, but some of the best things in life do.

Also, life is complicated and children are not the only factor that affect our ability to work to our full potential:

Women make up the majority of disabled people - in some demographics (particularly low income), we're up to 3/4ths of those with a long-term chronic illness or disability that affects work.

We're also the majority of carers for other family members like ill parents. Yes, I'm aware that doesn't make much sense with the previous point, but reality often doesn't make complete sense.

We're more likely to be the following spouse in work abroad and in relationships with multiple nationalities, we're more likely to be the one to immigrate.

Our capability to do well in school does not automatically translate to a life or society that enables us to turn that into career success easily.

Looking at my own life, I was raised being told girls like me don't get married and marriage was bullshit burden on women anyway but it's been a major benefit for me. Not all my risks in life have paid off so well, but it was one of the best choices I've made. I don't make blanket statements on marriage or civil partnership to my children, but when we've discussed it, I discuss the trust to protecting another person at risk to yourself if it goes wrong and that while they need to consider the legal differences for their own situations, I wouldn't advise having kids or taking on significant family care responsibilities with someone they're not happy to take on the risks and responsibilities of marriage/civil partnership with whether they're in the better or worse financial situation.

I guess it makes sense if you and your partner have well paying jobs and there are shared assets like a house.

But for someone like me who has always been a low-paid worker, I definitely would have been worse off if I’d have married my ex. So it’s definitely not a “one size fits all” kind of advice.

As women enter male dominated work forces like medicine the salary has decreased compared to national average wage.

Hi OP

According to your own stats, if 70% of women are working, and only 28% have reduced hours ie 72% do full time, that means only around 50% of women are in full time work. This means 50% of women on the surface have taken a financial hit for childcare directly.
However this doesn't take into account the fact that a lot of women once they have had kids return in a different job, one with less hours or less stress or less commute, or one that doesn't have unreliable shifts because it can't work around childcare or one that is evenings and weekends as it means their partner is home and they can tag team etc. And these jobs are normally lower paid.

Take this into account within the percentage of women working full time and suddenly well over half of women in work have still taken a career or financial hit for childcare.

That's before we take into account the fact that men don't do their share of domestic chores or childcare etc etc and so women have to take time off unpaid for kids sick days etc- just look at the pandemic where it was women who were trying to do the home schooling while wfh...these stats don't take things like that into account as its about quality of work, good impressions, availability etc..

It's not about women not being educated or capable. It's about men not stepping up when they have children, refusing to ask to change their hours even temporarily, refusing to do their share so the women have no choice but to.

@Clymene

That the common idea that women need to get married “for protection” doesn’t make sense for most women. This is because the majority of women work, earn their own money, are financially independent both before and after having children so don’t need to rely on a man’s money to survive.

Even if your statistics were right, you are making a lot of assumptions in this sentence which are simply made up. Just because a woman's hours of employment don't drop after having children, you have no idea if she has stayed in the same job and is therefore 'financially independent'. Also, even if (in your hypothetical scenario)a woman's earnings remained identical to those of her partner after having children, if their relationship ends, she is very likely to be stuck with majority of the childcare. But with half the income. If a woman's partner dies, she is not legally entitled to his estate if there isn't a will. Even if there is, his assets will be frozen until after probate.

If you rent together, if you're married, you have the right to stay in the home, even if you're not named on the tenancy agreement.

Etc, etc.

In summary,you're talking out of your arse

This.

I also think this is almost definitely a goady thread.

I've very rarely seen it said here that ALL women should get married in ALL circumstances. However, for a very large proportion of women, for all the reasons given, it makes absolute sense.

Its to support and protect the lower earner and whoever does the bulk of the childrearing and domestic work.
Obviously if that doesnt apply to you and you both have similar earnings and its all very equally distributed wrt both work and family then i guess the protection factor is less important.
Not everyone does get married, so clearly whether people recommend it strongly on mumsnet, doesnt mean it is like that in real life. In fact seems much more common that women have children, give up work and still never get the protection of marriage, leaving them at real risk of long term poverty

Not all of them, obviously. The financially independent, wealthy, educated women in your example don't need to. Obviously that would be the best path but a good education and the ability to own a home is not a privilege everyone gets to enjoy.

Women who are poorly educated and work in very low paid areas will only further entrench themselves in poverty if a relationship breakdown,, which, if she doesn't work was providing her with food and a home, renders her homeless and starving.

The best advice is don't get into that position. The second best is that marriage may give some protection against complete financial ruin.

It's also about the fact that trying to reverse societal expectations for a woman and be the majority earner and breadwinner who takes the lead on work is like pushing water uphill.

We gave my DC's primary school one email address for us that redirected to both me and DH. Twice now they've stopped using that address and started sending everything only to me, which I only found out when I asked DH something about the Christmas fair or whatever, and twice we've had to tell them to use the email address we actually gave them. When lockdown happened, I was juggling so much stuff that we told the school to delete my phone number from DC's file and use only DH's. Then they re-added my number by taking it from my email signature and called me first when DC was ill. On a number I'd specifically asked that they not have. It's maddening.

@Sloelydoesit

Ok, perhaps the message should be focussed on those women and men who haven't married yet and have had no children. and the message is:

Do not give up financial independence. Having it gives you choices. And puts you in a better situation than if you were ever reliant on someone else.

Never let yourself be dependent on someone else.

If that message can be spread now and people take heed, there will be a lot of happier lives in the future

Unfortunately this debate is not about marriage as protection. It’s about the ability of middle class educated women to have far more choice when it comes to being a parent. They have wealth and valued careers or jobs. Generally they can secure far better employer support than the office cleaner. Or they can hire a nanny.

Ironically I would say that women right at the other end of the scale probably don’t need to marry either.

It’s the people in between (low to middle earners) who will be financially devastated by divorce. They won’t have enough wealth to fund two homes and if the woman stopped working she will face hardship.

Maintaining financial independence whether married or not is the best advice for mainstream. Marriage is the safety net that will give you a foundation to restart if you divorce.

Our society is progressive and will continue to be so. It might be too quick for some and too slow for others but it will progress. And with that will be the assumption of equality in marriage and divorce. Girls need to be prepared for that in the future.

OP I do understand where you're coming from. I think you've had a hard time on this thread to be honest.

I haven't RTFT, but ultimately I agree with many of your points.

Although I do also see why people are advised to marry - it's mainly IMO if you're a SAHP or working on less money than your husband. But I agree that shouldn't really be the message, it should be to encourage the person to be financially independent not marry for security IMO.

This means most women (71.5%) did not reduce or limit their working hours. So it isn’t true for the majority of mothers that most women give up working after they’ve had children or that a man’s career remains unaffected and a woman’s career declines because of childcare

But “continuing to work” doesn’t mean a career isn’t impacted. Nor does it mean a woman has financial protection. It is more to do with disparity of earnings.

So if a woman is a low paid worker, living in a home owned by her partner, and they have children and they split, she is just as financially screwed as she would be if she were not working. She has to leave the home and find somewhere to live, probably with their children and without a divorce settlement, where the children live and what he pays is limited to whatever the CSA says he has to pay. I earn a decent wage, but if I had to leave our family home with our daughter because of a split, that would be really problematic for me. Not just financially.

My husband and I earn similar amounts, but my level of seniority is different to his. Guys of my age, with my experience generally are a level or two above where I am. I was keeping pace with them right up until I had my daughter. This is despite not having taken anything other than one year of maternity leave, and a 3 month period of working 4 days a week (which actually just meant for 3 months I was doing the same work just being paid less). My husband also reduced his hours for longer (and did actually only work 4 days) he also had a 9 month period where he didn’t work after he took voluntary redundancy. Given we’ve had the same amount of time out of the f/t workforce, shouldn’t his level have been impacted too? It hasn’t. He’s where his peers are.

Then there is what happens in the event of a death. From probate laws, inheritance tax, next of kin. These things are protected by marriage.

But for me the biggest thing is, if a partner is unwilling to commit to you by marriage, then having children with him is a bad idea.

@Fallagain

As women enter male dominated work forces like medicine the salary has decreased compared to national average wage.

Yes medicine is a good example of that pattern.

Male dominated specialisms tend to accrue more kudos and higher salaried positions, whilst countries where medicine is female dominated tend to pay lower salaries to doctors overall and a lower status on the profession.

But yay equality, no battles left eh. Frankly the best number men have pulled on women is convincing so many that there is actual equality

So when a woman says she doesn’t want to get married, most people will start talking about how marriage is beneficial because it helps protect women. They never specify like has been said in this thread that this advice only really applies to women who:

- earn a lower salary than their male partner
- are coming into the relationship with no assets
- are planning to give up working for a few years for childcare reasons
- are planning on becoming stay at home mums full time and never returning to work

It’s not just women who give up work, it’s also women who work part time.

The ONS said in 2019 that almost three in 10 mothers with a child aged 14 years and under said they had reduced their working hours to accommodate or limit the expense of childcare, compared with just one in 20 fathers.

Women working part time are missing out on wages and pension contributions which they would otherwise get if they were working full time instead of doing childcare. Part time working may also limit your opportunity for future career progression. If you separate from your partner having not been married, you aren’t entitled to any compensation for that sacrifice.

There are also other situations which are harder to quantify but still impact on women - for example, women who work full time but who choose lower paid jobs which don’t require any late nights or overtime because it means they can always pick up the kids from school, for instance. We know from the wage gap that it’s overwhelmingly women in these positions.

Many relationships have a younger woman/ older man dynamic. Biologically useful based on reproductive age and maturity. Socially awkward on establishing equal careers.

I was a student when I met DH. He was already secure in a career and geographically fixed. That limited my range of employment opportunities where there was a localised oversupply in my area. I made-do with short term/ temporary posts, but they have a hit on building up a pension. Fortunately we married before pregnancy. Pregnancy affected my ability to work and while I had earned Maternity Allowence in both pregnancies, I wasn't able to do much work in them and couldn't walk back into a post after mat leave. I managed to get contracts between the pregnancies and after baby 2, but at the point that I had 2 childrem in seperate childcare positions, DH was fequently working away in other countries. We have no support network and trying to do my own demanding job while covering all those domestic responsibilities was a nightmare. At the end of that contract I had a break, intending on resuming work when both had the same childcare needs... but DS1 has ASD and while he's "high-functioning" what he needs after 6 hours in a very sensory, social setting, is to go home and have a couple of hours to unwind. It's better for his needs that I continue to take a hit on my employment. I don't know how secondary transition will go. Hopefully when DS2 goes to secondary, they should manage and I can resume employment, but that's a massive gap in my history and pension contributions.

Into the future, DH will retire ahead of me. Do I waste his better years trying to catch up in the workplace then retire as he begins to decline? Or do I set aside the fragments of my career and enjoy life together (possibly working p/t)?

I didn't intend on being a SAHM and not for so long, but that's for the best in the package of family life that I have. I'm far from the least vulnerable position for a non-working parent, but I'm very glad that I was married before pregnancy. You can give yourself the best foundation you can, but life has curveballs along the way (that disproportionately affect women) and stages that are hard to anticipate in youth.

There is a big blindspot in society about the value of marriage as a financial contract and misconceptions about the worth of "common law marriage" persist. In some relationships it is better to not entangle finances, particularly older women in subsequent relationships who need to protect their children's interests.

‘ I looked this up, in 2019, 75.1% of mothers in the UK were in work. In 2020, 71.8% of mothers in the UK were in work. ’

So I am a woman married to a woman so in theory things are a bit more equitable in our marriage - and they are EXCEPT when it comes to earning power because gave birth to our children which meant 1.5 years of maternity leave, followed by 10 years of part-time hours. And those part-time hours meant not being able to go for a lot of opps at work - or rather going for them, only to be told it needed to have a FT person in the job.
Our choice, no regrets but I have definitely even discriminated against at work, overlooked etc for my choices.
So now I’m FT playing catch up, my pension is less, my position is less than DW, my salary is less - FIVE times less.
But, we’re are in a partnership, we are married, I do have a job, so I could be a lot worse off.

Totally agree OP! I can't believe the number of women who give up their financial security so easily and think they will be 'saved' by marriage. They won't be. They would have been far better off making sure they kept their financial security and shared the domestic labour and childcare.

I have seen so many women with good jobs (or at least jobs) go all gooey and starry-eyed at the mere hint of a ring and frock and then put his career first (for example, give up their jobs to follow him for a career move that benefits him) to their own detriment. Then after they have taken a 'job to pay the bills' (so he can be the main breadwinner) they have children that they, not he, gives up her work for, or reduces her hours, or takes a low-paid job for the 'extras' ... and is then left high and dry when he fucks off for something younger and tighter.

He haggles for all he can get, she is left with a mortgage she can't afford without his wage and limited retirement income.

We should teach girls that financial independence is everything, that their income is as worthy as his and that knights in shining armour are often slimy toads (no disresect to toads).

I also think this is almost definitely a goady thread.

I don't think its a goady thread: its playing devil's advocate to start a discussion. That's not the same thing.

The OP is asking us to look at the default position which is that women should always be married before having children, with fresh eyes.

People are bashing her for being goady or insensitive etc and I think she's being naïve but there's more than a grain of truth in what she says. Marriage is the best course of action if you're a SAHM or the lower earner but otherwise its not nearly as cut and dried as that and if you are the higher earner its usually a bad idea.

It's perfectly reasonable to question whether marriage should be the default "best practice" position. Society is changing and we should be open to changing too.

When it comes to children and childbirth, most women don’t give up their careers so protection doesn’t apply to them either. I looked this up, in 2019, 75.1% of mothers in the UK were in work. In 2020, 71.8% of mothers in the UK were in work.

Yes a large number do, you have to compare those statistics to % of father’s in work which is 92.6%. This means there is a significant gap of over 20% in employment of mothers vs fathers.

In 2019, only 28.5% of mothers with children below 14 years old reduced their working hours to accommodate childcare. This means most women (71.5%) did not reduce or limit their working hours. So it isn’t true for the majority of mothers that most women give up working after they’ve had children or that a man’s career remains unaffected and a woman’s career declines because of childcare.

Again, compare that to fathers, while essentially 3 in 10 mothers reduce working hours for childcare, only 1 in 20 men do. So that means again a significant gap between mothers and fathers in terms of hours worked.

That statistic also only shows hours worked. Over half of mothers (56.2%) said they had made a change to their employment for childcare reasons, compared with 22.4% of fathers. In addition, around 1 in 12 (8.0%) mothers said they had changed jobs or employer to help with childcare arrangements, compared with 1 in 50 fathers (2.0%).

Mothers returning to work usually do so with a different employer and for lower pay. Whereas the pay for fathers actually increases. The “gender pay gap” is mostly a motherhood pay gap.

“There remains however a large difference in gender pay gap between employees aged 40 and over and those aged below 40 years. For over 40s, the full-time gender pay gap is 11.9% to 12.3%, while for under 40s it is between 0.9% and 3.0%. Sarah Jackson, visiting professor at Cranfield University School of Management, said: “These new figures show we’re making slow progress towards gender pay equality. Motherhood clearly still has a huge impact on women’s career progression, with women who are over 40 or in more senior roles more adversely affected by the gender pay gap.”
www.personneltoday.com/hr/uk-gender-pay-gap-2021-ons-progress-slow-as-motherhood-penalty-persists/

Ha, come back when you're 40 and give us the benefit of your "lived experience" then.

I say this even as someone who didn't benefit from marriage to the father of my child. The marriage was short and unpleasant - rather like the man himself, boom tish. We divorced with no assets, a clean break. I won't get married again to ensure all my assets go to my child.

Even if marriage didn't benefit me, it's very clear to me that in the aggregate, motherhood carries a much higher financial penalty than fatherhood. It takes time to show, and if you're still at the life stage when you and your friends are just starting to have children, you may well not have seen it yet. Marriage gives you a legal stake in assets acquired through shared effort, and this is important to a statistically significant number of women, although not to all.

@LethargicActress

I agree with you OP. The double standards are ridiculous in a society where we’re supposed to be striving for equality.

Men are called cocklodgers for marrying men who are financially less well off, but women who do the same are just protecting themselves.

I don’t want to be considered less capable of providing fo myself and my dc just because a tiny proportion of my working years were interrupted when I chose to have a couple of children.

That's because men, in general, have far more opportunities than women. I know lots of high flying career women and without exception, they've all had a much, much harder time than men to get to where they are today. There is a massive amount of sexism and inequality built into careers like tech, law and finance.

I work in tech. I've had to battle every step of the way to be taken seriously. None of my male colleagues experienced this. They were encouraged and helped, not mocked and put down. I was the only girl in my IT class at school and experienced all kinds of harassment and poor treatment. Lots of other girls were interested in computers but were put off studying IT because of this kind of thing. And that's how it starts. That's how girls end up drifting towards low paid careers.

I'm well into my thirties now and the sexism hasn't stopped. It's very rare I go to an event or teach a workshop and don't get some kind of stupid "ooh you're not just a pretty face" or "how cute, a girl who can code" sort of comment. Men in my position are automatically respected. They don't have to prove themselves over and over and over again. And this feeds into men being more confident, more likely to ask for pay rises and insist on promotions, because they're not being constantly undermined and talked down to.

How old are you OP?

It's now as I'm in my 40s and people around me are going through divorces and breakups that I can really see the wisdom of the advice given to women to marry before having kids.

I know so many women that are SAHM or work very part time who would have been financially screwed had they not been married.

@LethargicActress
I don’t want to be considered less capable of providing fo myself and my dc just because a tiny proportion of my working years were interrupted when I chose to have a couple of children.

Sadly reality doesn’t give us what we want. The statistics show that mothers ARE less employable and paid 12% less than fathers. Mother said are also discriminated against compared to childless women as they are also are paid 3% less than childless women in the exact same job.

@NewFem
Oh right, I didn’t mean inherited, I guess I used the wrong word. I meant they were given money from their parents while their parents were still alive - like women given money by their parents to help them get on the property ladder. Like parents who pay their deposit for a house.

Wow, you’re so out of touch with ordinary working class women, I’m actually embarrassed for you. Maybe spend some time visiting a few council estates around the country and then report back if you’re still holding the same (Tory voter) opinions?

I don’t know a single women friend who was given a chunk of money by their parents to start them off. Some of us grew up with parents who rented their entire lives so didn’t have pots of spare money to gift to their kids when alive or even after they died.

A significant number of women will never afford their own property. If they’re already working on minimum wage when they fall pregnant, it’s going to take a lot of effort and some degree of luck to move into significantly higher paid employment whilst simultaneously having the responsibility for childcare during school holidays, plus any sickness related caring.

Where I live there are no breakfast clubs or after school clubs to offer cheaper childcare options to enable mothers to work full time hours, so many of us end up being SAHM by default. Our school summer holidays are 8-9 weeks long for primary school and 12-13 weeks for secondary school. Many working mothers here rely entirely on non-working grandparents to offer free childcare for most of the summer period. If you don’t have that option, you won’t find many employment opportunities that can support such long holiday periods.

Have you considered the women who also have very limited work opportunities because they are caring for older family members? Sons, brothers and fathers are rarely pressured to reduce their hours of employment to provide free care to children or older family members.

Finally, what about the women who suffer from chronic I’ll health or struggle with poor mental health? Where do they figure in your egalitarian utopia?