Even when women enter a female-dominant sector like midwifery, where 98.5 per cent of the workforce is female, men still earn more than their female counterparts.
While the gender pay gap is narrowing, it’s shrinking so slowly that by the time it reaches its predicted closure date in 2056, most of the women currently working will be retired or stranded on a roof trying to survive the latest global warming flood.
The stay at home girlfriend and “traditional wife” are trends on the rise.
If you’re among the 76 per cent of Australian women who choose to have children, you’re likely to be starting later than your mother or grandmother, with the average first-time mum in Australia now aged 32.2 years old. These delays mean you’ll be inundated with advertising telling you to “play it safe” by freezing your eggs for IVF, a process that costs about $5000 a round.
Once you enter parenthood, you’ll also have to set aside almost 21 hours a week to undertake unpaid domestic chores. If you want to return to work, you’ll also have to grapple with childcare rates that, for many, increased almost as soon as the federal government introduced greater rebates to try to help women out.
The growing number of women choosing not to have kids aren’t off the hook either. You’re more likely to be required to take on caring duties for relatives. And if you’re single and without children, you face a much greater risk of homelessness in later life.
And if you really want to succeed both professionally and romantically, you’ll need to dedicate a portion of your wage for the length of your working life to dying your hair, styling your hair, removing unwanted hair, applying creams and serums that promise to reverse signs of ageing, and having micro-amounts of toxins injected into your skin to paralyse your muscles when the lotions invariably don’t work. Be sure to a gym membership to “keep it tight” and, if you wear sculpting underwear to further the illusion that cellulite doesn’t exist, don’t forget to find a good masseuse because your back will be in constant pain. You’re also more likely to have a chronic health condition and experience medical misogyny, so don’t forget to put some money aside for that, too.
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Add all of this to a cost-of-living crisis, growing class inequality and the earth burning and flooding itself on a terrifyingly regular basis and suddenly, it doesn’t seem so surprising that women aren’t eagerly signing on the dotted line.
The social bargain has been rigged and stacked and seriously broken for a long time. The problem now is that some women aren’t willing to buy into it anymore.
Depending on where you live and the colour of your skin, things have gotten infinitely better for women thanks to the tireless efforts of the feminists who came before us. In Australia, we can vote and get divorced and have a credit card and access birth control and live with someone before getting married.
Feminism isn’t to blame for this dumpster fire that modern women find themselves in but neither are the trad wives spruiking the joys of frilled aprons. Maybe dusting ornaments and wearing pearls isn’t for you, but when the alternative is a system that’s both thankless and near impossible to conquer, who are we to condemn those choosing the path of leisure?
Katy Hall is deputy opinion editor at The Age.
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