But among mothers who work full-time, the rate of wife-having is much lower: only 15 per cent. …in Australian workplaces, 76 per cent of full-time working dads have a ‘wife’. With someone like that, women could focus entirely on their career – you know, like men can now. The term ‘wife’ is used loosely to describe a partner at home raising the kids, making the meals, remembering when the school concert is on and generally keeping the home fires burning. If women in senior positions were blessed with wives in the same way that men in senior positions frequently are, we might see a participatory uptick, because women wouldn’t have to choose between having a career and having a family. But Crabb’s The Wife Drought is the first I’ve read in a long time that also points to a solution: working women need a ‘wife’. Most of the feminist critiques are adept at pointing out the problem, and for that I’m grateful. Male job applicants are demonstrably preferred over female candidates. Women are under-represented in positions of seniority.

I’ve often enjoyed those too.īut there comes a time when it all begins to get repetitive. I’ve read lots of interviews with women in positions of influence and power. I’ve read lots of feminist critiques of the workplace, and I’ve enjoyed most of them. But why? And what to do about it? Annabel Crabb thinks she has the answer. The higher the workplace position, the fewer women. None of these is necessarily untrue, but, according to Crabb, the real issue is not what takes place within the office but rather what happens outside.We’ve all seen the alarming stats about women in the workplace. Theories abound as to why: women need to ‘lean in’ they suffer from the ‘confidence gap’ the corporate glass ceiling remains intact. Yet at the apex, women are still absent: only ten per cent hold executive positions, and only two or three per cent are CEOs.

In middle management, their numbers are similar to those of men. We know that Australian women comprise about sixty per cent of university graduates. When Crabb commented on how fortunate they were to have helpful spouses, Plibersek replied, with characteristic dry wit, that she sincerely hoped they would be the last generation who needed to feel lucky about that. Why is it that women with supportive partners are still thought of as lucky, as if they have won a lottery? In the winter of 2012, Annabel Crabb ran into Tanya Plibersek, who had raised three children over the course of a successful parliamentary career with the help of her husband, a senior state bureaucrat.

The wife drought by annabel crabb