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

Frankly, it's clear from this site that a lot of people still don't understand the difference. I've been tearing my hair out on another thread about the split of an unmarried couple where people keep saying things like "you should get spousal maintenance!" and "when you go to court you can ask for a share of his pension!" and "you are entitled to stay in the house until your youngest is 18!"

My partner died a few months ago. If we were married I would have recieved bereavement benefit to help me with the costs of raising our children for a while. Because we weren't married, I get nothing. Marriage would have offered me some financial advantage in my situation

@Fallagain

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

Except that more women enter specialisms like pediatrics, which is underpaid compared to most, partly because there are more women probably! Or eg anaesthetics as you are better able to manage your schedule with family than most surgery, so I have a cousin and his wife and he’s a surgeon and she looked at the career types and became an anaesthetist. You need another example.

Everyone, including the OP, is right about the advice given to mothers to marry. A thread can have more than one opinion. There are always a handful of posts saying you must get married, without any qualifications. So OP is right to say that advice is given. But also, if appropriate to the thread, there will be posts from others advising not to marry, if the woman is the higher-earner or has greater assets.

Apparently OP only remembers the posts she disagrees with, and the ones castigating her as wrong only remember the posts they agree with.

@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 a shame that you don’t want to feel that’s true. We all have to confront less than ideal realities as we grow up, and the reality and statistics are that it makes a difference. Not for every single woman, but enough that across the board it makes a significant difference, and I’m afraid that reality we live in doesn’t care what you want.

I don't know anyone where the mother doesn't do the majority of the childcare and so hasnt had their earnings effected.

Doing the majority of the childcare does not necessarily affect earnings.

I don’t think when anyone advises unmarried mothers to get hitched it’s because they think they need to be rescued by a man. It’s common sense. Raising children is a partnership and it’s a way of the mother’s contribution being recognised. The bloke couldn’t pursue his career without her, so she deserves a share. A marriage contract does that.

In my case, marriage was a big mistake. I was the one with job and assets and am now liable for a cock lodger who doesn’t even look after the kids.

No- one is suggesting marriage is great because women have someone to look after them.

Even with the figures you quote, the reality is that a quarter of women are potentially financially vulnerable. What are the figures for stay at home dads? Can’t be more than a couple of per cent.

@ForgedInFire

My partner died a few months ago. If we were married I would have recieved bereavement benefit to help me with the costs of raising our children for a while. Because we weren't married, I get nothing. Marriage would have offered me some financial advantage in my situation

I'm sure this changed recently so you didn't have to be married to claim it. Worth looking into. Sorry for your loss.

@ForgedInFire

My partner died a few months ago. If we were married I would have recieved bereavement benefit to help me with the costs of raising our children for a while. Because we weren't married, I get nothing. Marriage would have offered me some financial advantage in my situation

www.gov.uk/government/news/cohabiting-couples-to-benefit-from-changes-to-bereavement-benefit-rules

Both myself and DH qualified same professional degree, same year. It requires antisocial hours/late working. Pre kids, my salary kept pace, we could work the same evenings/weekends if necessary.

Since we had children, His salary has increased more than mine, he has paid off his student loan. He has a small amount of flexibility to pick the up kids if ill and can do 1-2 nursery drop/pickups a week but generally works beyond 6pm and some weekends. Most of this falls to me.

My wages have increased but less than his. I am part time as we would struggle to do our jobs and find childcare outside of standard hours (and want our children to have a settled routine and the chance to do after school clubs and play dates a couple of days a week). My student loan is still over 10k after 12 years as the interest chugs back on every time you take mat leave. I have paid less into a pension. My professional fees and other work related costs are the same as his. I have less job choice being the second earner as even considering changing jobs requires a lot of negotiation surrounding childcare, nursery have limited availability and a 6 week notice period for any changes.

I am not complaining, if we wanted to swap places we could have done, but I don’t think I could ever make up the lost ground due to maternity so as a family we would be worse off. This isn’t really a problem being married as we are a family unit and if we were to split, I have a claim on what he has accumulated through an unhindered career while I have taken a financial hit to raise our family. This would not be the case for me if we were not married.

@RandomLondoner - it likely does compared to same person without childcare - ie there is an opportunity cost.

Person not having to do childcare/domestic work can put more time into further study, networking, preparing more for presentations.

Of course if 1 person does childcare and other does equivalent domestic chores/life admin then it doesn’t really apply that much as the Labour could be comparable.

What type of work do women with children do OP? 75% maybe working, but are they now doing low paid jobs because they're flexible and fit around the family? Or are they carrying on with their higher paid but inflexible jobs like the fathers?

@Catastrophejane

It's not so much that people are suggesting women need to be married because they need someone "to look after them". I think in the cases where people are advocating marriage its usually an unmarried SAHM where its cut and dried. You're basically buying an insurance policy.

Where it gets more complicated is where the couple earn roughly the same or the woman earns more.

In theory marriage should be fairer in this case and it would be if there was an even split of roles and responsibilities. But where this so often comes unstuck is where the man doesn't pull his weight with children or domestic work.

So an increasingly common scenario is you have a man and woman both in professional roles earning equal or close to equal salaries and working long hours but the woman ends up doing the bulk of the childcare and domestic work on top of that. So the woman is effectively doing two jobs for less money, resentment builds, they split etc. In this scenario its not clear that the woman is better off having been married.

Or worse still, a situation where a man gets hitched to a high-powered woman where all of the above applies but the man uses this as an excuse to coast. So the woman does all the professional work, all the domestic graft and the man does the childcare (but odds on the woman still does the other domestic labour). And in that nightmare scenario the man could walk off with the house and the children.

So in those increasingly common scenarios its far from clear that marriage is a good idea.

This is a non-idea. Its not the 1950s and I have never heard anyone say 'get married for financial protection.

Unless its a a situation where a woman has children with a man and then believes herself to be a common law wife when theres no such thing at all.

Or marries a broke man then pointlessly boasts about working her fingers to the bone for "independence"

Hmm, thing is that advice about women needing to marry for financial and legal protection, aka access to a share of a man’s money is given here to women as a whole.

Because what a man earns is his, and what a woman earns is to support ''her'' children?
Analyse your own beleifs for a moment, look for contradictions, because you seem to be prone to confirmation bias. Are parents responsible for their children, or just mothers?

You cannot be serious. You’ve honestly never heard of the gender pay gap? Whilst it is illegal to pay men and women differently for the same job women are constantly overlooked for promotions and pay rises because they’ve taken a year per child off for maternity leave. I’m 36 & don’t have children but it has been assumed that I’m “at that age” so it’s imminent and I’d be incredibly naive to think this doesn’t affect my job prospects. Women who do have children but continue to work full time usually have to ask for flexi hours for school drop offs, take more time off than the children's fathers for socks days for the kids, are less likely to be able to do overtime etc.

Trotting out those stats in your OP just makes it sound like you’ve never met another woman in your life before. I highly recommend following the insta account pregnant then screwed for a broader perspective than the one you currently have.

When my DH died leaving me with DCs aged 4 and 9, being married meant I was entitled to Widowed Parents' Allowance (based on the NI contributions he had paid throughout his life in recognition of the state pension he would never collect) which has kept my little family just above the breadline ever since.
Other fiscal and financial matters were much easier to sort because we were married.

Marriage provides me great protection, I now work part time on twenty hours a week, a quarter of my previous salary. My husband earns half the amount I previously did but he can’t quit his job as there is a legal minimum service required.

I’ve had children in my 20s, once I return properly to working I’ll be behind my peers.

I bet there are loads of women like this up and down the country and marriage provides protection.

SOME protection. SAH and PT working still entails pretty high personal financial risks.

That’s a shame that you don’t want to feel that’s true. We all have to confront less than ideal realities as we grow up, and the reality and statistics are that it makes a difference. Not for every single woman, but enough that across the board it makes a significant difference, and I’m afraid that reality we live in doesn’t care what you want.

Bingo.

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

I think that should be the case. But it isn't. Women usually earn less than men and often work part-time or not at all, or change to less well paid jobs to fit in with childcare.

I am not one of those women. I earn more than DH, we own our house jointly and he's not an ar*ehole anyway. But sadly many women buy into the fairytale of a man looking after them and it all goes horribly wrong.

And although I said I am not one of those women, I suppose I am because I don't work full-time. However, as my son is now 19, I could. But I don't want to. That's a different issue though.

Approximately 1/4 women quit work altogether after having children.

Of those that do go back to work, approximately 1/4 don't go back full time.

I'd like to know the equivalent stats on dads.

A quarter of women quitting working when they have children is still millions of women.

And to your point, I've only seen that recommendation made when a woman is in a vulnerable financial situation eg has quit or reduced her job to look after DC and is reliant on her husband's income. I'm sure we all know someone in that situation.

“When looking at women and men without dependent children, there were 70.6% of women without dependent children in work in 2019” - there were 75.1% of women with dependent children in work in 2019

Sorry I've skipped a few of the pages in the middle, but 'women without dependent children' includes retired women - I haven't looked up the exact numbers but 18% of the population (and women live longer, so more than half of those will be women) are over retirement age, so yes, it's not surprising that there are fewer of them in work - in fact, I'm a little surprised it's so close!

So if you're pregnant and you're planning to return to full-time work without pause, that's great until you have a child who is disabled/has additional needs and it has an impact on your progression and earning abilities for several years.

Protections aren't for those for whom everything is tickety-boo, they're aimed at protecting those who are or become vulnerable, for any number of reasons. Even someone who was planning to return to well-paid, full-time career may find they are vulnerable after all if life throws them a curveball.