When Andrew Clover met Livy Lankester he was writing a novel and earning tiny
sums from stand-up comedy. She had a proper job and earned a proper wage.
When he complained about how little he earned, she would ask why he didn’t
do something else instead.
“And that would plunge me into an existential crisis,” he remembered.
They married and had two children (though not in that order). As head of
corporate responsibility in a large retail business, Liv still earned more
than Andrew.
“So I started doing childcare,” he recalled. “I took an old-fashioned male
view: ‘I have failed at my work, so I’m looking after kids.’ I was a lone
man in the world of kids. I felt a bit gay as I pushed the buggy up the
streets of Hackney.”
People would tell Clover — who writes the Dad Rules column in The Sunday Times
— that they admired him. “They’d say it must be terribly fulfilling. I
wanted to say: ‘I’m a man. If I’m good at something, I want acknowledgement.
A fancy job title. A pay rise. I don’t expect to be changing nappies in the
middle of the night — working with sewage, for no money, for someone who
shouts at me’.”
As he puts it himself, he had the domestic instincts of a smack addict. “The
living room was an orgy of dismembered dollies. We were eating tea in the
bath. I didn’t fix anything. The bulbs would go in the bathroom: we’d use
candles.”
Clover’s predicament is by no means unique. According to a survey by Investec,
the banking group, 39% of women who work full time and have partners believe
that they earn more than them.
That “believe” is a telling point: this is still a sensitive and highly
secretive corner of the domestic battleground. Fiona O’Sullivan, a
headhunter whose husband earns less than she does, said: “You could probably
get more people to talk to you on the record about how often they have sex.”
The Investec survey indicates that 1.8m women in full-time work across the
country earn more than their partners. This seems to be supported by figures
from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), which show that more men than
women now “work at home” (and we know what that means): 14% of men compared
with only 8% of women. Half of women aged between 22 and 29 earned more than
£9.55 an hour in April this year, according to the ONS, but less than half
of men in the same age bracket earned as much.
It’s clear that both men and women are struggling to deal with these altered
dynamics. All too often men are made to feel useless, while women struggle
to maintain the fiction that they can succeed at work and also uphold a
traditional role as wife and mother. Or, as in my household, the man
struggles to maintain the fiction that he can do everything — while his
high-earning wife watches telly.
BAFFLINGLY, research suggests that once a wife’s income is greater than her
husband’s he tends to be less and less involved at home. Well, you could
have fooled me. Working women may sacrifice themselves in the population at
large, but it’s not how it works in my house.
My wife Harriet has a proper job in an office, and I stay at home. I do the
vast majority of the housework. Regardless of who happens to have brought
our daughter Nancy home from nursery, it’s me who makes the dinner. We both
put Nancy to bed, but afterwards, while Harriet watches telly, I do the
washing up. (Harriet washes up roughly once every three months.) I empty the
bins, clean the windows and even do the sewing: I’ve replaced buttons and
patched jeans.
When Nancy was born, Harriet fed her at night — in our bedroom, with the light
on. I was obliged to sit up and wait until the end so that I could do my bit
by winding her. We got her onto bottled milk fairly quickly, which meant I
could do the night feeds alone. Harriet slept through them. Today, when
Nancy is unwell, it’s as likely as not to be me who looks after her — even
though I’m self-employed and will not be paid to take the day off.
In case you’re wondering, I also do the DIY and the gardening. In fact I had
no idea how much I did till I wrote it down. Incredibly, Harriet doesn’t
dispute it. She just asks who’s going to look worse when it appears in print
— her for being lazy, or me for being a big blouse?
For the record, it’s not necessarily true that I earn less than Harriet — whom
I obviously adore, despite her light touch around the house — but as she
cheerfully reminded me last week: “There was one dismal year when you earned
practically nothing at all.” Rather generously, she added that, as somebody
with no great interest in material possessions, I was “quite cheap to run” —
so it made little difference how much I earned. ~
A man in a similar position is Anthony McGowan, who is married to Rebecca
Campbell, a fashion designer and novelist. “I’d always had a crappier job
than Becky,” McGowan says. “When we first met she was working for her
family’s fashion business and I was an impoverished PhD student. Later I got
a job working for Customs and Excise — a killer combination of boring,
difficult and badly paid. When we had our first child it seemed natural that
I should be the one to give up work.”
The plan was that McGowan would also be able to write; he had already composed
half a novel. But he found being a stay-home dad trying. “It was a reprise,
if you like, of the boring, difficult and badly paid civil service job. But
if anything I had even less time to write. And Becky definitely started to
look on me in a different light.
“As I was home all day she expected me (perhaps reasonably) to keep the house
tidy. I’d always done most of the cooking, so there was no change there. But
there had definitely been a shift.”
Did he feel emasculated? “That would be going too far, but there was an
element of that. Becky would reach for her cards whenever we were in
restaurants with friends, even though we had a joint account — and that
never looks good from the male perspective. And anyone we met from a
business-type background would want to talk to Becky, while I’d be
discussing nappies and breastfeeding with the [non-working] wives.”
The problem, as McGowan sees it, is that people always overestimate the amount
of work they do and underestimate (or undervalue) the work their partner
does.
“In the early days of a relationship passion blinds you to minor inequalities;
but as the years roll by one finds oneself making more careful assessments
of the relative contributions you make to the domestic economy.”
As a philosophy graduate he has a rather specialised explanation for this:
“It’s the transition from Rousseauian innocence to the cynical calculations
of Hobbesian possessive individualism.”
Quite so. Every couple occasionally finds the repressed feelings bursting out
into furious conversations about who is the better parent, who cares more,
who has the less important job, or who is indispensable at work.
All too often, in the homes of higher-earning women, the result is that
relationships fall apart. The richer a woman becomes, the more likely she is
to divorce her husband, according to Randall Kesselring, a professor of
economics at Arkansas State University, who examined the finances of 112,740
women. He found that for every £10,000 a wife’s earnings increase relative
to the family’s overall income, the chances of marital break-up rise by 1%.
There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence to back up that study. Clover has a
friend, Richard, who gave up his career to look after three kids. “They also
hired a young male au pair. Richard’s wife left him for the au pair. It was
brilliant: a complete inversion of what used to happen.” He knows of two
other couples that went through a similar break-up.
Sex and food are the glue that can hold together the marriage of a powerful
woman, says Elaine Molesworth, who works in a senior position in publishing
and has always earned more than her husband.
She confided: “My theory about how to keep the husband happy, if you are in
the power position, is that you have to do the sex and the food as much as
possible. Even if you don’t feel like it. You have to do that to make the
marriage work, even though that’s quite unfeminist. If you want to have it
all, you have to do it all. I don’t mind cooking, and I do the odd thing in
the boudoir . . .”
FAY Weldon allegedly “outraged feminists” by suggesting in her latest book,
What Makes Women Happy, that women should fake orgasms to keep their men
content. More pertinently, she said: “Men are being undermined. Their role
is hard to define now. Because if women can look after themselves, what are
men for?” Society at least pays a lot of lip-service to improving women’s
opportunities. But you don’t read much about creating a new role for men.
Duncan Fisher, of Fathers Direct, says: “The old ‘gender agenda’ is based on
the premise that you can fix equality for women with no reference to men at
all. This is based on a deep sense that men can’t change, won’t change and
don’t really care about their children like mothers do.”
He thinks change is occurring: “The new gender agenda is about interdependence
— you can’t fix women’s lot without engaging with men. The new agenda
accepts that men are as passionate as women about their children, that men
are changing massively and that this is a huge opportunity for women and for
men.”
I’m not sure that women are convinced. Take childcare. I’ve lost count of the
number of invitations to toddlers’ parties, to which I’ve accompanied Nancy
while Harriet was at work, that read: “Mums and nannies welcome!”
Fathers regularly feel ignored by the array of mothers and female staff when
they pick up children from school or nurseries.
Denise Knowles, a Relate counsellor, sympathises: “You hear umpteen dads talk
about taking their kids to school in the morning, and afterwards the mums go
into each other’s houses. Men haven’t been invited, but if they were, could
they go? What would people say?”
Even Beverley Hughes, the minister for children, young people and families,
recognises this ambiguity. Earlier this year she challenged “those
unconscious but powerful messages that tell fathers they are neither
important nor particularly welcome”.
She added: “In case anyone thinks I’m overstating the case, just remember how
difficult it can still be if you’re the only woman in a territory that’s
traditionally and exclusively male . . . The automatic default position is
that parent equals mother. This has to change.”
George McAuley, chairman of the UK Men’s Movement (UKMM), doesn’t think there
is much hope of that. He said robustly: “Women having equal power has the
potential to be a disaster for society in general and for children in
particular. Many of the men who come to us, having lost a bit of economic
power, are edged out of the family.”
McAuley blames men for their own problems. He says he’s virtually given up on
them and he only bothers chairing the UKMM out of concern for children. “I’m
quite sick of the apathy of men. They’ll turn up in their thousands to watch
a football club but won’t protest against the ripping out of a father from
the family.”
That may be true of some men. Others have come to terms with the phenomenon of
high-earning women in a decidedly positive way — by becoming gold-diggers.
Match.com, a dating website with 15m users, is seeing a rise in men who
specify that they want to date only women above a certain income level. In
2004 more than half specified a minimum income for dates, up from 37% in
2001. And 35% of male users of True.com, a dating website with 2.7m users,
seek females with higher incomes than their own.
Some men in settled relationships with a high-earning woman are also taking a
pro-active interest in exactly where the money is coming from. Glenda Stone
is CEO of Aurora, a recruitment specialist for women in business. She says
her website is visited by huge numbers of men, who nowadays take a great
interest in the companies their wives and girlfriends work for.
“It’s about doing due diligence,” Stone said, “and finding out about where
their partner is going to work. There’s a lot at stake, with maternity leave
and opportunities to go back into the company afterwards.”
And some men sensibly rejoice in their good fortune. Peter Leary, whose
partner Jane earns more than he does yet works fewer hours, said: “I love
it. As her earnings have crept up and overtaken mine the pressure on me has
fallen away significantly. It gives you more confidence to do the things you
want to do in your own work. You don’t have to worry about toeing the line
so much.
“I’m in an occupation where money is not the objective, so there’s no
competition between us. Occasionally I get it in the neck for spending 70
hours a week at work for ‘a pittance’ and she asks, ‘Why can’t you do
something that pays properly?’ But the answer’s obvious — I don’t have to
because that’s what she does.”
MOST “overshadowed” men, I think, do find a route to happiness. For McGowan,
things started to improve when he got a publishing deal and his books became
successful. (The most recent, Filthy, won the Book Trust Teenage Prize this
month.) “But there were still issues. I try hard with the housework, and in
terms of effort I do most of it. But I’m not very good at it, so Becky is
constantly slightly irritated by the way things are.”
For the record, Becky argues that it’s “total bollocks” that he does all the
housework. “We have a full-time nanny and a cleaner. Tony has not picked up
anything from the floor since 1985. But I do concede that our diet would be
mainly toast if not for Tony.”
She still earns more than him, and once in a while comes home early to catch
him having an afternoon nap. “It doesn’t matter if I’ve spent six hours
hammering away at my keyboard — as far as she’s concerned I live a life of
leisure,” said McGowan.
“Other aspects of the work I do are quasi invisible — shopping, for example.
Sometimes I think Becky believes the shelves just automatically fill up with
things to eat. And she barely notices the way I expertly pee all around the
inside of the loo to remove any unsightly deposits.”
Clover, too, says things have improved. “I became a good father. And I started
to have a great time. So did the kids. We make birthday cards together. We
make books. We spend whole afternoons pretending to be Sleeping Beauty, the
Wicked Witch, and the Handsome Prince. So now when Liv comes home we’re all
in the bath pretending to be mermaids and pirates. Everyone’s laughing. And
the house is tidy.”
Somehow, he has also managed to write two books, Dad Rules: how to be happy,
with your kids, and his first novel The Shade, out next year.
“I’m happy to describe myself as a stay-at-home dad,” he said. “Although I
prefer the title trophy husband. And I feel immensely loving and grateful to
Livy — that she’s allowed this to happen. I think our situation is great. I
think more people could be like us. We’re the happiest family I know.”
