After having to put her career on hold to raise kids, our writer wonders if more female leaders could change this frustrating reality.
“Jacinda Ardern!” we said in unison, attempting to flatten our bodies up against the wood-paneled, integrated refrigerator so a fellow partygoer could squeeze past us.
It was 4:30 p.m. on a Saturday and like a gourmet sardine, I was packed cheek by jowl with a ragtag group of 40-something parents in the kitchen of a tiny and stylish East London flat.
This was the second five-year-old’s birthday party I had attended that day, and while balancing a room temperature glass of white wine in one hand and a slice of $60 birthday cake in the other, I found myself deep in conversation with a fiery and diminutive Polish woman whose name I failed to catch.
While our daughters were having unicorns painted on their faces in the living room, we swapped pickling recipes and book recommendations, then casually traversed into the conversational hinterlands of the injustices of unpaid care-work and the unadulterated gender bias that tarnishes every waking second of our lives.
We tried to list the world leaders who were actually putting the wellbeing of future generations ahead of their own self-interest and narrowed it down to one single name: Jacinda!
Just two years older than me, the former Prime Minister of New Zealand (sadly, after six years in office, she stepped down in 2023), was only the second world leader to have a child while in office. I still have those images of her bringing her baby to the UN clear in my mind. She was an advocate for women’s rights, mental health, the environment, fought against poverty, inequality, all the things; she quickly introduced gun reform after a horrific shooting and handled the pandemic how we wished every politician would have.
We were soon cut off by our sugar-addled and overstimulated children, but as I bundled them into their coats and dragged them out the door, my usual panicked thoughts of what I was going to make for dinner were drowned out by the conversation I’d just had.
Why aren’t there more world leaders like Jacinda? Why aren’t there more women world leaders at all? I turned the question over in my head as we stopped to collect my son from a playdate. It made me think about a quote from Annabel Crabb’s brilliant book The Wife Drought about the compounding factors stacked against women who want to both have children and a career in politics—let alone a career at all.
“‘Having it all.’ It’s such a totemic phrase when used with reference to women, and it’s so loaded. ‘Having it all’ sounds greedy. Unreasonable. Impossible, too. And you will never hear that phrase used about a man, even though men—particularly in politics—very commonly combine demanding careers with young families. For them, having it all is perfectly possible because they’re not doing it all.”
Indeed. If career progression and children are part of the same equation, then someone is spending time doing all of the things that need to happen to keep said children alive; and those demands don’t normally play so nicely with the long hours needed to climb the ladder at work.
Despite my strong feelings about a woman’s place—literally anywhere she wants to be—I’ve fallen victim to these retrograde pressures.
I took time off work after having each of my children, first as an American expat living in Australia, where my son was born. Then in London, after my daughter was born, where we settled six years ago. I tried to fit copywriting jobs around my partner’s career in journalism and my babies’ naps for years. My dwindling earning potential didn’t warrant paying for childcare, so I worked ad-hoc, freelance jobs until my first child was old enough to start preschool. In other words, I took myself off the career ladder and let my transferable skills atrophy for three years.
It was in these depths of new parenthood that I saw an unwelcome and predetermined path unfurling before me: mountains of laundry, untold numbers of diapers, a loss of identity, and isolation. So, I decided to go back to school to try to chart a new path that would be more rewarding and one that would be fortified against submission to the role of stay-at-home parent (one which I personally didn’t want, but no judgment to anyone who does).
I studied for a master’s degree in urban design part-time in between taking my son to school and working shifts on the newsdesk at the BBC, all while pregnant with my daughter. That year, when I turned 36, I was bestowed the unwelcome double title of “geriatric mother” and “mature student.” Neither accurately portrayed how I saw myself, but both clearly telling me how society viewed me as a woman entering her late 30s.
As I rummaged through the cupboards for something resembling a wholesome meal, with a cacophony of the Bluey theme song blasting from the iPad and the Mario Brothers tune blaring from the Switch, another thought popped into my head: How would things be different if we had real representation at the top of the political structure?
If just over half of the people with ultimate decision-making power were women (in line with the global population), what would shape the policies that govern all of our lives?
I’m not suggesting that women are inherently better than men. Of course, we have had a few of our own make it to the top of the political pyramid. But despite their best efforts, the likes of Hillary Clinton, Benazir Bhutto, Angela Merkel, and Kamala Harris have not in fact managed to cure all of society’s ills.
But, what about all of the other brilliant capable women whose leadership and ideas we haven’t had the chance to experience? How might things be different if so much of women’s time wasn’t consumed by Sisyphean domestic tasks?
And not just at the executive level, but in every aspect of life. How can it be that in 2024, when women are graduating from university in significantly higher numbers than men, women working full-time in the U.S. are paid 83.7 cents to every dollar a man earns (this gap is even wider for women of color and those over 35), and are massively underrepresented in leadership roles at work?
Part of the answer lies in another rage-inducing statistic: Women and girls do 75 percent of the world’s unpaid care-work, the equivalent of 12.5 billion hours of every day. And since the earth and its pesky axis only give us 24 hours to work with, we just can’t fit it all in.
A recent Deloitte survey of 5,000 women in ten countries showed that 40 percent reported prioritizing their partner’s career over their own, in part because of the demands of the domestic work they also shouldered.
As I dumped a box of orzo into one pot of boiling water and a bag of tortellini into another—because my children cannot abide eating the same thing for dinner—I mulled over the inconceivability of the rampant inequality that persists in the majority of households in the land.
According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), on average around the world, women do about 4.5 hours of unpaid care work a day, while men do just over two hours. And while the amount of time women spend on unpaid work fluctuates in relation to the number of paid hours they work, men, whether they are working full-time, part-time, or not at all, max out at an average of 20 hours per week.
Even in families where parents consciously try to share the domestic load (of which I am a member), the systems in place are so pervasive that even when women are the main breadwinner, they are still largely responsible for childcare, cooking, and cleaning.
In fact, as Crabb points out in her book, some fascinating research from the Household Income and Labour Dynamics In Australia (HILDA) found that once women earn over 66.6 percent of the household income, the time they spend doing unpaid domestic work actually starts to go back up.
The thinking is that even when women earn more than their male partners, or perhaps especially when they do, they compensate by doing more domestic work to assert their “femininity,” or to protect their partner’s sense of “masculinity”. (Much of the existing research on these topics and the stats I’ve included here look at heterosexual two-income households. I would be fascinated to see some studies on how same sex couples experience the balance of paid and unpaid labor.)
Which is to say that despite all of the gains women have made towards equality, the gender norms that actively limit women’s time are stubbornly persistent. And statistically, chances are that even if you are the one bringing home the bacon, scheduling doctors appointments and doing bath time will likely still fall to you.
The path of least resistance often includes moms taking time off when babies come along. For many families, this is because the cost of childcare negates potential earnings. But looking only at how much money mom would make versus paying for childcare leaves some big factors out of the equation. Taking time off work in a key stage of career progression often kneecaps women’s potential to achieve, shrinks future earning and saving potential, and contributes to feelings of loneliness and depression.
It also puts moms on a different path from the get-go. Spending more time with the kids when they are little makes moms the experts on how to care for them. This means we end up shouldering more of the parenting for years to come. And while we are spending all of this unpaid time Googling how to remedy chapped nipples, and worrying if letting our kids cry it out is creating lasting brain damage, our paid time is becoming less valuable, and we are becoming less employable.
Blind studies have shown that when men become fathers, they become more attractive to employers because they are seen as responsible and trustworthy. When women with the same experience become mothers, they are seen as flaky and unreliable and passed over for jobs, promotions, and pay raises.
So even starting from equal footing, when kids come along, many women become disadvantaged, losing earnings, job security, and retirement contributions. Not to mention the added kick in the pants that is being responsible for another human who will spend a good few years spewing bodily fluids and pulling your hair. And we wonder why birth rates are falling around the world.
Over dinner at our kitchen table recently, once I managed to extricate my daughter from my lap so I could access my plate, I shared some of these insights with my partner (who was enjoying his dinner unencumbered by small people).
“But what about all of the happiness people get from having kids?” he said in total sincerity.
My eyes narrowed as I momentarily turned my attention from the locked battle over screen-time I had become embroiled in with my son, while at the same time trying to dry my daughter’s tears brought on by me “not making the right sad puppy sounds.”
“No.” I said. “That’s not a thing.”
And although depressing, plenty of data and the ever insightful Jennifer Senior and her book, All Joy and No Fun, back me up. Joy over the course of a lifetime? Maybe. Happiness while actually parenting? Decidedly no.
Not that anyone who has spent a significant amount of time alone with small children isn’t painfully aware, but research actually shows spending time caring for children has a negative impact on parent’s wellbeing and psychological health—and this is more pronounced in women than men.
I remember having conversations about the concept of “having it all” with my partner years ago before we were that serious. He said if a couple had kids, someone would need to stay home with them. I said I didn’t agree; surely it was possible for couples to have children and both have fulfilling careers.
In hindsight, we were both right in a way. Of course, it is possible to have kids and a career, but someone certainly does need to spend the many hours caring for those kids. So either there needs to be massive compromise and a priority shift, or bucket loads of money to pay for help.
My priorities have shifted: I sought out a flexible working arrangement because someone needed to be available to do drop-off and answer the phone when the school calls about a fever (or six bloody noses in one day–I kid you not!). I am building my way back to a fulfilling career, but my professional ambition is absolutely tempered by domestic demands.
And sadly, I do not have bucket loads of money. In fact, I’m paid roughly the same wage (although I work fewer hours) now in my 40s, after having kids and also obtaining a graduate degree, than when I was working full-time in my 20s. I am also paid less than my partner, who in case it isn’t clear, also has two children.
His earnings have steadily increased in the years since our first child was born, but his priorities have also shifted. As my paid hours have increased, he has decreased his hours at work so we can share the load—both earning and unpaid domestic work—more evenly.
Like many working parents, though, I am baffled by the misalignment of the working day and the school day. Even if I pay for care before and after school, it’s barely possible for me to fit a workday in the office during those hours. Just like the unaffordability of early childcare, everyone knows that this system does not support working parents—but no one talks about it. The system expects someone to be at home at 9 a.m. and 3 p.m., and it’s usually a mom.
While some of the onus is on individual families to figure out ways to share domestic duties more fairly, the real changes need to be made at a policy level. Politicians and industry leaders are often parents who have lived through the challenges themselves, so why aren’t we seeing better policies around parental leave, subsidized child care, and flexible working patterns?
It’s decidedly clear that we need more people like Jacinda, with both lived experience and political power, to support those of us doing the crucial work of caregiving—tidying the house, scheduling the extracurriculars, planning the birthday parties—whether this was the path we envisioned for ourselves or not.
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by Katie Beck
Katie Beck is a Policy Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where she works on child-friendly urban design and policy. Previously, she was a broadcast journalist for BBC News. She lives In London and has surprisingly good knowledge of the Billboard Hot 100 from 1994, but usually cannot remember where she put her glasses.
