Barnett makes some good points – note the website advertising alongside the artice “dating withut drama -be the woman men love; “catch cheating wives” etc. from whose perspective?
Do you have a good wife? Do men make good wives? Can we share the load?
– Jacqui
National StoryRSS
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Tracey Barnett: Women need good wives
5:00AM Wednesday August 22, 2007
By Tracey Barnett
Answer this: Which list reflects countries with the higher percentage of women executives?
A: United States, Britain, Canada.B: Brazil, Philippines, Botswana.
If you chose list A, you’d be dead wrong. Not one of those countries even made it into the top 10 of 32 countries polled, whereas each one in list B did, a survey by international business consultants Grant Thorton shows.
In fact, the old boys of Europe – such as Germany, Italy and The Netherlands – landed at the bottom of the heap, ranking only slightly above the biggest loser, Japan, where just 7 per cent of executive ranks were filled by women, even though half the workforce is female.
It doesn’t make sense. Canada and Britain represent open, rich, developed societies with highly educated women who take their civil rights as a given.
If these nations aren’t pumping out power women, who is?
The surprise winner is the Philippines, where a whopping 97 per cent of businesses have women executives and where 50 per cent of senior managers are women, compared with 24 per cent in New Zealand.
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AdvertisementWhat’s in their water? Is the Filipino power elite starting to hand the torch to this new generation of highly educated working daughters? Or are the high rankings of Brazil and Botswana testament that developing countries are learning from the mistakes of tradition-entrenched Europe and are now doing a better job utilising the newer half of their executive workforce?
There are briefcases of material to digest on this topic, but one less palatable point that most of the highest-rated countries have in common is that they have extreme socio-economic inequities, meaning there is a big enough population of poor people willing to work at low wages, so even the middle class can afford cleaners and nannies. Translation: these working women have a wife.
Unsuspecting Kiwi working women may not have heard of this concept. People are actually paid to do things that you’ve always done after you’ve come home from a long day at the office. Really.
When I asked a woman at the Ministry of Women’s Affairs if she had statistics on how many of us have a cook, a driver, a cleaner and a nanny, the poor woman laughed so loudly that she snorted into the phone. I believe I can interpret that number as statistically small.
The last check in New Zealand, in 1999, showed that 60 per cent of men’s work is paid, but 70 per cent of women’s work is unpaid.
Not a problem if there is an agreed trade-off between doing important societal duties such as raising children or raising pay cheques.
It gets considerably less pretty when both partners are working full time, yet she – compared with him – is putting in an extra two hours a day at home on unpaid work.
Suddenly that adds up to two entire extra working days tacked on to her fulltime work week – time that does zilch for the executive potential of her CV.
More crucially, are her unpaid work commitments at home early in her career, especially with children, keeping her from bagging the executive chair in the long term? Forget the glass ceiling, nobody’s talking about the sticky floor that’s also draining the working achievements of women.
We’re not exactly a poster child for female potential. Although women make up 59 per cent of university graduates, only a paltry 16.9 per cent get tapped to be professors, 17.2 per cent to join top legal partnerships and 24.2 per cent to become judges. And a pathetic 7.13 per cent of women sit on corporate boards.
Even if we just quietly set aside the argument that elite men promote their own from familiar power networks, let’s just go back a step. Shouldn’t we be teaching our most ambitious young women to be having a drink with a new client rather than cleaning the pizza cheese off the bottom of the oven?
Because that’s how her male partner is getting ahead.
For potential women leaders in their field, isn’t part of this equation about conscious choice and not just economics? If you want to see your daughter in Helen’s job some day, teach her that committing disproportionate time to unpaid work relative to her male partner carries a real long-term personal cost.
In the name of crucial national research, I’d like to ask our Prime Minister this: Who changes the empty toilet rolls in your house? If it’s Peter, then this country owes him an Iron Cross for allowing you to realise your career potential. But if it’s been you all these years, we need to talk.
Forget policy to bolster future Girl Power, instead send a package to every man in this fine land with a note that reads: “Boys, it’s called oven cleaner.”
I was a wife! Of many men. And women.
Feminists have known that a woman could use a wife for a long time. Hell, who doesn’t? Barnett’s article only proves what Judy Syfers said in Why I Want a Wife, published in the very first issue of the Ms. Magazine in 1971 (there is a copy in Cupcakes and Kalashnikovs: 100 Years of the Best Journalism by Women*).
You should go read it – it’s so funny. And true. What more could have Syfers achieved if only she had a wife? What could we? What if every woman in the world had a wife?
So: shall we all run out in hoards and get married to a wife? A man wife, if you felt so inclined. I am sorely tempted myself. Who has time to clean cheese stuck inside the oven? Certainly not me. I would be lucky if the rice maker stopped growing that blue fuzzy thing that you must never ever sniff, not in any circumstances, in fear of death, etc.
But at what cost? I was a commercial cleaner once. My parents were part of a big commercial cleaning company and I helped. They were both fresh immigrants. They couldn’t speak English. They did not like the job. They worked with a lot of dangerous chemicals in a hurry. They were the first to blame if something went ‘missing’. Their employer didn’t pay them for months at a time for no good reason. And at the end of the day, it was really gross to clean other people’s toilets. Many times a day. Over and over and over again. Ergh. But it’s true: right now, it’s the job that no one wants to do. I think that it’s an honourable job, honest money that you work hard for, or honest satisfaction from a job well done. But right now, if it’s not the white woman doing it, it certainly ain’t gonna be done by a white man, but men and women of colour, or other kinds of marginalised men and women.
Yes, I would LOVE to have a clean house and absolutely no more two minute noodles. (Because, god damn, it’s not just that I notice more housework to be done, but I desire it more than my male flatmates – excuse my bad socialisation). But at the cost of someone who is even more marginalised than me?
I think that this is the best way ahead:
‘The house of the millennium is still a temple of vicarious leisure, that is, pointless activity that serves no purpose but to demonstrate the status of the people who perform it. The amount of human work and attention that the house can absorb is and will remain limitless. The only way to escape this tyranny is to abandon the house. Some women do it by retreating into a single room and refusing to clean even that, living like a hamster in a cage full of litter…’
— Germaine Greer, The Whole Woman
Rationalising the state of my bathroom,
Hamster Woman Lisa.
*http://voyager.auckland.ac.nz/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?Search_Arg=cupcakes+and+kalashnikovs&SL=None&Search_Code=TALL&PID=5d0Emeqzv0_kIAi5SkIoLVn05_9I&SEQ=20070823215222&CNT=20&HIST=1
Brilliant Lisa! I’m all for lowering our standards in the regard but also for teaching the next generation, our children, our boys to do their fair share of “wife work”, taking pride in it. I’m planning to build on my three year old son’s current passion for cleaning (especially if it involves water-play).
I’ve never been able to employ someone as a “wife” for precisely the reasons you give – at some level it will always involve me exploiting someone more marginalised than myself; and if we don’t do this work ourselves we won’t be able to appreciate it the times when others do it for us,
I remember well the small block of wood my grandmother had hanging in her kitchen: “A housewife’s work is never noticed, except when it isn’t done.”
— Jacqui
Haha that is so true. Housework is never noticed except when its not done. I just wonder whether the boys who are tought to clean up and take care of the household grow up to be a man and still have no issue with cleaning and doing ‘wife work’. I think the social construction of masculinity won’t allow it. Even it they have no problem with it, other male friends or society which expects women to do housework will be a big barrier.
It’s quite funny thinking about it. My boyfriend puts in a lot of work in terms of cleaning and tidying at his place than his mum and sister combined. Everyone always teases him about what a great wife he’ll make and I’m told to never let him go. Maybe I just got lucky?
Perhaps the socio economic divide within countries such as Botswana indicates that only a small proportion of individuals, regardless of gender, have actually obtained professional and economic power. These developing ‘B’ nations may not have perpetuated the historical exclusion of women from the public sphere, thereby bypassing the whole traditional reluctance attached to allowing women entering the Old Boys Clubs of nations such as Europe and Britain — which removes the underlying gender stigma from professional opportunities.
I hate to sound cynical and to get on the down-buzz, but statistics are often skewed. If we look at places like Europe and America, which are generally considered to be influential and powerful nations, we might in fact discover that, in comparison to Botswana, there is actually a greater physical number of women in power. Also, a person holding a mediocre corporate position in America may be held in higher regard in Botswana. Different social climates foster varying social and professional standards.
This article outlines the nations which we perceive to be financially capable and economically sound: America, the UK, NZ (we hope!) etc. These nations also produce a less extreme environement of social inequalities, and an expanding middle class. And as the article states, there is a large enough population of poorer people willing to work for less in menial professions deemed to be ‘the chores of the wife’. It is important that we consider the proportion of poor people in relation to the affluent; if Botswana did not have an abundance of the poor, would the rest have had the opportunity to seek financial security and power? If there was no one to ‘clean their ovens’, would they have had the time to be able to attempt to elevate their social status?
I think we could investigate the utilisation of domestic care services within nations such as NZ. Many of us have cleaners or nannies, and many would be in a positin to afford them. So why don’t we have a skyrocketing number of female executive? I think this particular issue has a lot to do with the ever growing separation of wealth in ‘B’ nations.