Biological sex should not determine what we are capable of, what we aspire to, and what we do in our life.
—Anne-Marie Slaughter, author, lawyer, and political scientist
If I asked whether you want to earn a lot of money, the answer would probably be, Heck yeah! But if I asked whether you want to earn more than your partner, the answer might be different. One of the things I noticed as I spoke with other women about making money is that even if we plan to earn a lot, we still tend to assume our current or future partners will, too. Even ambitious, breadwinner-minded women don’t generally set off to be the main earners for their households.
But millions of us end up there—whether we planned for it or not. And just as it takes time to get comfortable asking for more and investing our own money, fully inhabiting a role we hadn’t anticipated having can take some adjusting, too.
If you’re single, you know who’s responsible for managing the finances and household (you!). If you’re in a relationship and you each earn about the same amount of money, dividing the bills and household tasks can also be pretty straightforward. That’s where my husband and I started.
But if your income and job demands start to exceed your partner’s, it can get trickier. That’s especially true if either of you had different expectations of how those responsibilities would break down. That’s the time to start talking about what feels fair, both in terms of housework and covering expenses. (We’ll talk more about that in the coming pages.) An income gap—regardless of who earns more—can also create an uneven power dynamic in a couple. But that can be mitigated by ensuring both of you are involved in the money-making decisions, management of finances and future planning, and that each partner’s opinion is treated as equally important.
Throw kids into the mix, too, and things can get even more complicated—as I discovered. Then we’re talking not just about bills and household tasks but about who’s taking care of the little ones. And it’s not a simple matter of splitting childcare fifty-fifty, because, unlike household chores, we actually want to spend time with our kids. Each partner also generally comes with preconceived notions of what being a good parent means and of who is supposed to take the caregiving lead, which may be based on memories of parental roles that look different from the ones we find ourselves in.
You may not have or want kids, so may be tempted to skip ahead (and that’s fine!). But I found that this perceived conundrum in balancing our responsibilities at home and at work lies at the heart of many women’s apprehensions about wholly embracing a breadwinner mindset and achieving their full earning potential. Whether or not you’re married or plan to have kids, understanding where these concerns come from can be enlightening. In the coming pages, we’ll take a deeper look at the cultural conditioning many of us have gotten around our responsibilities at home, and look at the impact that has—not just on working moms but on working women generally.
I’ll also share my experience as the primary breadwinner for my family of four for the past dozen years. Yes, I am living proof that it’s possible to be committed to your family and to your professional ambitions. (And you’ll hear from others as well.) I’m deeply involved and connected with our sons, and I have the added joy of knowing I am helping to provide a wonderful life for my family and setting an example for our boys. I’m in a position now to support our sons with all the resources they need to thrive, to help cover their college costs, and to set them up for financial success as adults. That’s an incredible feeling.
But getting to this point was a journey, and it required me to confront many of the ideas I’d absorbed growing up about money, marriage, and motherhood. As I’ve learned from personal experience—and you’ve probably figured out by now—in order to fully embrace a breadwinner mindset and enjoy all the benefits that come with it, we must first confront the beliefs that stand in the way.
When what had seemed like a temporary financial arrangement became our new normal, both my husband and I struggled initially in the face of cultural expectations. Victor was ashamed at first to admit to his father, a former commercial airline pilot who’d been the sole breadwinner for much of Victor’s childhood, that I earned more than he did. I was ashamed to admit that I sometimes preferred the comforting rituals of work to the unpredictable periods at home with my young kids, especially during their temper-tantrum years.
I felt guilty about prioritizing work over family at times. Victor felt guilty about not contributing more financially. I felt shamed by my stepmother, who still cooks complicated dinners nearly every night for herself and my dad, when she made offhand comments about my kids subsisting on take-out, chicken nuggets, and pasta. And I felt guilty when I worked late and missed dinner altogether.
Upending the conventional breadwinner model meant upending our own ideas of what our marriage would look like and how our household would operate. It wasn’t just a matter of who earned or contributed more, or how we divided our financial obligations. This new dynamic forced us to face all the underlying, unspoken emotions and assumptions we had about our roles.
Many of those feelings came from expectations we’d carried with us, those we realized we’d had for ourselves and those others had for us that we had internalized over the years or heard about regularly. It’s not just news headlines that warn against upending the conventional breadwinning model—the one that values women most for their looks, homemaking, and parenting abilities and men for their moneymaking abilities and professional status. Our own, sometimes well-intentioned, family and friends can do the same.
“Almost all of the women around me in my family—even my aunts and older cousins—were homemakers. No one was telling me it’s important to be a breadwinner,” remembers Michelle, a thirty-eight-year-old Brooklyn mom who runs a consulting firm. “But I had one really badass grandma. She always worked, and when her husband passed away, she continued working and supporting herself—and she truly loved it. I think she was the only example I had growing up of a woman who worked both to support herself and really enjoyed it.”
“Even now with friends and family, honestly, sometimes you really have to spell it out for them: Our household depends on me working,” said Michelle, who earns more than double what her husband does. “Still, when there’s a family event and my brother says he can’t go because of work, it’s okay and no one says anything. But I don’t get the same reaction when I say I can’t go because I have to work.”
Mothers-in-law who stayed home themselves to raise their sons, in particular, can struggle to understand how their son’s wives could value their careers as much as their sons do (maybe even more!).
“My mother-in-law actually called my mom and said, ‘You need to tell her to stop working. It’s inappropriate for her to be working,’” remembers Alyson, who runs a New York–based PR and marketing firm and lives in New Jersey with her three kids. “I couldn’t believe it. But she hadn’t worked, and my sister-in-law stopped working when she had kids and didn’t go back even after the kids were in school. So I’m sure that was part of it.”
Jennifer, a mom of two in New York who works in the pharmaceutical industry, remembers when she first got married in 2006, “My husband made more than me and was very comfortable in that role, and he felt very secure.”
Then she went back to school to get her master’s degree and, after she leveraged it to get a major promotion at work, began outearning her husband. She vividly recalls a visit to her in-laws shortly after. “His mother sat down with me and said, ‘I don’t understand why you have to work and why you can’t let him be the breadwinner,’” she remembers. “No woman in his family works. They just didn’t understand it.”
Christine, a colleague of Jennifer’s, met her husband when they were both graduate students. After they got married, he became a pharmacist, and she went to work for the pharmaceutical company. Within a few years, her income exceeded her husband’s. “But he couldn’t admit to his family that I made more,” she said.
After she gave birth to their son, her in-laws began pressuring her to stop working. “My mother-in-law had been a physician, but she gave up her practice when she had kids,” Christine told me. “I remember she said to me, ‘Don’t you know that kids with mothers who stay home do much better than kids who don’t?’ I looked her in the eye and said, ‘My mom worked the entire time I was growing up, and I think I turned out fine. So, no.’”
Still, Christine said she felt initially like she had to do “all the traditional mom things” on top of her job. She dropped off and picked up their son from daycare every day. She took him to doctor’s appointments and playdates and stayed home whenever he was sick. “My husband said he was worried he would get fired if he took too many days off for his kid,” she remembers. “His boss had told him, ‘That’s what you have a wife for.’”
As Christine found, all these societal expectations about breadwinning are heightened when kids enter the mix. It’s something I experienced firsthand, as my breadwinning potential came smack up against my cultural conditioning as a daughter, a wife, and—crucially—a mother. When I was growing up, my dad was the sole breadwinner for many years for our family and then the primary one. I had no reason to think the model would be much different when I became a parent.
My mom stopped working when I was born and didn’t go back to work until I was in middle school. She was the one who taught me how to read, took me to dance class, and came to all my recitals. I can still picture her, leaning over the edge of the ice rink when I competed in figure-skating competitions, pumping her fist in the air and cheering me on. And I remember her looking me in the eye and reassuring me that I was beautiful when a high school boyfriend broke up with me and insisting that I deserved better than him anyway.
I don’t have as many memories like that of my dad. I mostly remember him being distracted at the dinner table and heading off to his home office as soon as my sister and I cleared the table. Once, I remember him bringing me to the university where he worked and letting me try the coffee in the faculty lounge (which I mixed with four heaping spoonfuls of sugar and promptly spit up). But the only times I remember really bonding with him were Sunday mornings after church when the whole family would go for long drives around Dallas, checking out new neighborhoods and restaurants. I cherished those hours because it seemed like the only predictable period of time I had with him.
When I was thirteen, my parents split up and offered my sister and me the choice of which parent to live with. We didn’t seriously consider moving in with my dad, much to his surprise and disappointment. For my sister and me, that seemed inconceivable. We were with our mom every day. We mostly spent time with him on Sundays.
I wanted to have a successful career when I grew up and to get married and have a family. I didn’t plan to stop working altogether when I had kids. But I’d assumed I would slow down, maybe even go part-time for a while to spend more time with them. I didn’t want to be a Sunday mom.
What I hadn’t factored in was the possibility that I might be the main provider when we had kids. And how exactly that would work.
While I enjoyed the newfound confidence I felt about my earning power and financial status and the comfort of being able to provide for myself and my family, I hadn’t anticipated how my breadwinning ambitions would run headlong into the expectations I had for myself as a mom and a wife. I didn’t want to follow my dad’s model and devote myself entirely to breadwinning, nor did I want to follow my mom’s lead and give up my career for years to be a full-time caregiver to our kids. But I had no model for how to blend both roles.
Because it has been framed as a binary choice—you’re either the breadwinner or the caregiver—we often grow up believing the two are incompatible. And breadwinning has been associated for decades with men, while we are still brought up to believe that caregiving is primarily a woman’s responsibility. So it can be difficult to imagine how to merge the two successfully. But we can, as I’ve learned. It just requires us to redefine our roles based on our reality—and not on our expectations or childhood experiences.
I remember calling my dad late one night, after a particularly grueling day at work. When he asked how things were going, I broke down. Between sobs, I told him the financial pressure of being the primary earner was intense. I loved my job and relished making a good living. Yet I’d been working late so often, it seemed like I never got to spend time with my family. At home, I was often tired and distracted, responding to work emails on weekends and sometimes working after the kids went to bed during the week. There was a moment of silence, and then he said softly, “Now you know how I felt.”
As I listened to him describe for the first time the pressure he felt as the sole provider for much of my childhood, I sympathized with him and had a new appreciation for the sacrifices he’d made. But after I got off the phone, I began to realize it was my experience with my dad growing up that had led me to equate being the main breadwinner with thinking about work and money all the time. And to believe that taking care of my family financially meant not having the time or bandwidth to take care of them emotionally. That being the main breadwinner meant giving up time with loved ones in order to work to provide a better future, hoping that one day they would understand and appreciate your sacrifice.
But did it have to be that way?
Did being the primary breadwinner have to come at the expense of my being as involved as a mother and wife as I wanted to be? How much of the pressure that I felt was based on actual work demands, and how much was driven by my own beliefs about how the main earner was supposed to behave? Were my workaholic tendencies driven by my boss’s expectations, or were they an outcome of what I’d witnessed myself growing up? How much of the pressure I felt was emotional, the result of cultural expectations I carried about the level of responsibility a mom should have for her home and family as well as for her job?
After that call with my dad, I began to look more closely at where the beliefs I’d adopted about breadwinning and the roles a husband and wife “should” have came from. And I wondered what might change if we began to redefine those roles for ourselves.
The male breadwinner model rose to prominence in the 1950s when one income was enough to support a family and a middle-class lifestyle. And in the nearly seventy years since, corporate policies and cultural expectations, even public school schedules, have continued to support it. Despite the gains of the women’s liberation movement in the 1970s, the prevailing assumption was that men would continue to be the ones to have a full career, and women—even if we did work—would hold secondary, supportive roles. We’d still be expected to manage the household and swap our paid work for parenting or caring for loved ones as the need arose.
It was as if husbands and wives had an unwritten social contract—at least, those in middle-class and upper-middle-class enclaves. (Breadwinner moms were historically more common in low-income areas, where moms were also more likely to be single.) The unspoken assumption was that the husband would take care of the income, and the wife would take care of the household. Staying home with the kids was often seen as a choice and a privilege, a luxury that only women with successful husbands could afford. “Opting out” was a status symbol, and the implication was that women could simply opt back in whenever they wanted. For much of the twentieth century, the typical assumption was that if a mom worked, it was because she had to—not because she wanted to.
But that’s changing. More women have been moving into the workforce because they want to, and their income has become increasingly important as the costs to raise a family continue to climb. Two-income households are the norm today among married couples, and two paychecks are often necessary in order for many families just to maintain a middle-class lifestyle. By 2013, nearly half of all households with kids—or 16.4 million households—had a mother bringing in at least 40 percent of the total household income.
Even in those families in which the husbands earn a lot more, many wives have discovered that “opting out” of the workforce after kids and then back in again years later is not easy, especially given the speed at which technology has disrupted nearly every industry. In 2003, a group of highly educated, accomplished working mothers with high-earning spouses made the cover of the New York Times Magazine, under the headline “The Opt-Out Revolution,” for choosing to drop out of the workforce just as they were hitting their stride professionally in order to stay home with their kids.
A decade later, the New York Times ran a follow-up article that included many of the same women, called “The Opt-Out Generation Wants Back In.” While those with elite college degrees and the most well-connected social networks had found it relatively easy to return to the workforce, Judith Warner reported, the jobs they found usually paid less than their previous positions and were less prestigious. And the women she spoke to who lacked high-powered networks and prestigious degrees, or those who had since divorced, she wrote, “often struggled greatly” professionally and financially.
The decision to stop working also shifted the dynamic at home for these women in unexpected and unwanted ways, “transforming them from being their husbands’ intellectual equals into the one member of their partnership uniquely endowed with gifts for laundry or cooking and cleaning; a junior member of the household, who sometimes had to ‘negotiate’ with her husband to get money for child care,” Warner wrote.
The economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett, founder of the Center for Talent Innovation in New York, surveyed thousands of women in 2004 and again five years later and found that roughly a third of what she described as “highly qualified women” had left the workforce in the interim to spend time at home. As with the “Opt-Out” wives portrayed in the New York Times, most discovered it was much harder to return to work than they had hoped. Eighty-nine percent of those who’d left said they wanted to go back to work, but only 73 percent of them succeeded in getting back in—and notably, only 40 percent got full-time jobs. And those who went back to full-time work took jobs that paid, on average, 16 percent less than those they’d had before. About a quarter of the women surveyed took jobs with fewer management responsibilities or said they had to accept a lower job title than the one they’d had when they left.
I remember one of my mom friends, a talented photographer and former magazine photo editor with an Ivy League degree, telling me at the playground how she had quit her job when her son was born. A few years later, when her son was still a toddler, her husband divorced her. But in the time she’d been out of the workforce, the magazine industry had transformed from print to digital. She had no digital experience and struggled to find work in her field. When we spoke that afternoon, she was planning to apply for loans to cover a master’s degree program to bring herself up to speed so that she could get hired back into the field she’d left. “I never would have quit my job if I’d realized I was committing career suicide,” she told me.
Men generally haven’t had to deal with these dilemmas. The assumption has been that they will continue to ascend in their careers post-kids—it’s not even a question that comes up—because there’ll be someone else caring for the family and doing most of the work at home. So they can focus on making money and doing the fun stuff with the kids. While mom is washing dishes, making meals, cleaning, and looking after the kids on a daily basis, dad gets to take the kids to ball games, or on fishing or camping trips, or just sit on the couch with them watching TV. At least that’s been the traditional arrangement.
But when the mom has a demanding full-time job, especially if it accounts for a significant portion of the family’s income, that arrangement no longer works, as I learned myself.
When I first became the main breadwinner for my family, I’ll admit I felt angry. Angry at being thrust into a role I hadn’t prepared for. Angry that I didn’t have the “luxury” of staying home longer with our newborn. Angry that I was suddenly the one carrying most of the financial responsibility, not just for my future but for my family’s, too—a possibility I’d never planned for and still felt ill prepared to handle.
And when I wasn’t angry, I was often steeped in sadness or guilt. It wasn’t that unusual for me to burst into tears in the shower. Or in the bathroom at work. Or, once, in front of my boss. Eventually, I got a therapist. And I spent entire sessions talking about how overwhelmed, exhausted, and confused I was by the sudden surge in responsibilities I felt I had to manage.
At home, all I could see was the dust on the bookshelves. The dishes stacking up by the sink. The water stain on the ceiling from the leaky pipe that needed to be fixed. The dirty shower curtain that needed to be replaced. The sag in the middle of our mattress. The toddler bed our oldest was already outgrowing. The stains on the shades I’d bought for the living room. The half-dozen prints still leaning against the walls, waiting to be mounted. Everywhere I looked, there was something to do. Our baby crying to be fed. Our toddler tugging at my leg. The dirty clothes piling up in the hamper. The formula needing to be mixed and warmed. The work emails waiting to be answered.
When I looked in the mirror, I noticed prematurely gray roots peeked out weeks after I got my hair colored. Were the bags under my eyes just the temporary effect of my constantly interrupted nights or the new normal? My high-heeled shoes made me wince when I walked—all of them tight, now that my feet had grown a half size with my second pregnancy. My work wardrobe needed an update. All my dresses were tight around my chest, which had swollen from nursing, and around my stomach, which had yet to return to its flattened pre-pregnancy state despite daily sit-ups.
It seemed like I was spending an increasing amount of effort and money just to keep up my appearance—new under-eye concealer, Spanx, stretch-mark cream . . . Even when I wasn’t spending on myself, I felt like I was hemorrhaging money: on daycare and clothes, shoes and books for the boys. Groceries, toiletries, diapers, wipes, and baby bottles. And later, on baseball and soccer, and the clothes and equipment that came with them. Birthday gifts, field trips, trips to see the grandparents. Although my husband was covering some of the bills, I started to fear that I was less a parent than a human ATM. That I was spending more money than time on my boys. It seemed like every event I planned with them turned into a shopping trip.
I’d always excelled in school and at work. I was accustomed to pleasing my teachers and my bosses. Now, suddenly, I was struggling to stay on top of my life. It wasn’t a matter of excelling anymore, but of just getting everything done. And the stakes had never seemed higher. I was now in management, responsible for a team, a budget, and aggressive metrics—the most demanding role I’d had yet. I couldn’t afford to lose this job, or even miss a paycheck, with the expenses we had. I was trying to adjust to my first management role while also adjusting to being a parent of two—and the main provider for our family. I had never had so many competing priorities or operated on so little sleep. This constant feeling of falling short all the time, no matter how much I scrambled, left me with a crushing sense of sadness and self-doubt.
The result was a never-ending to-do list. I woke up an hour before my family and stayed up late, working after the kids were in bed. I was juggling housework, playdates, and work meetings, afraid to let anything go for fear it would all unravel. I was continually shifting my schedule around to make it all work. Very often it didn’t. In my attempt to squeeze everything in, there was very little margin for error. I was constantly texting or emailing with apologies for being late or absent. I felt like I was in a perpetual state of scrambling.
My husband and I alternated dropping off and picking up the kids from daycare and preschool, and he began picking up more household tasks. But for nearly a year after our youngest was born, I was still pumping milk for him and getting up most nights to nurse. Even after I stopped, I continued to insist on managing most of the family logistics—formula feedings, birthday parties, playdates, mommy-and-me yoga—so that I could feel connected to the kids and their daily lives, since I worried I was less present for them day to day.
Wait—isn’t this supposed to be a book promoting breadwinning for women? I promise this story has a happy ending. Read on.
Looking back later, I wondered why I didn’t ask my husband for more help when the kids were young. Why didn’t I hire a house cleaner or a part-time sitter to relieve some strain, even if it cut into my earnings? Why did I feel such pressure to take almost all of it on myself?
It seems obvious now that as my work hours, demands, and salary grew, I would need more help at home and with the kids in order to manage it and continue to provide the essential income for our family. But I couldn’t see that initially through the blur of busyness that clouded my days. What I eventually realized was that being the main breadwinner itself wasn’t the burden. It was the weight of the cultural expectations—and the bulk of the household work—that I was carrying. Sure, there are pressures that come with being the main provider in a marriage or family, but what’s really hard is trying to do that and everything else.
At first, the thought of Victor taking on more caregiving duties actually seemed more of a threat to my identity as a mother than a relief. And during particularly stressful times, the idea of him taking care of us financially seemed like a welcome alternative (If only Victor earned more, I would tell myself). Only later did I realize that could have been the most dangerous choice of all: to give up my income. And to give up the parts of me that lived outside my children and my home. That initial instinct to cut back on my career, I came to understand, sprang not from an actual desire to stop working or to lower my professional ambitions, but from deep-rooted beliefs I’d inherited about what being a good mom required and the fear that I would fall short if I were also the main provider.
So creating a new dynamic that worked with my husband required being honest about what was most important to each of us—what pieces of parenting mattered most, and how we could stitch those together so that we each felt ownership of some parts and were able to share the others. Then we figured out how to split up or outsource the critical household tasks so that they didn’t take us away from what mattered most: spending quality time together.
I had to examine what I was doing because I felt like I should be doing it rather than because I wanted to do it. What was I doing out of guilt? And what was I doing out of genuine desire? When my career and earnings took off, the reality was that I couldn’t continue to take on as much at home as I had, so some things had to go. I began by looking at what I didn’t want to let go of: taking the kids to school, spending time with my family in the evenings, and finding activities we could do together, even if it meant just getting a treat from the local bakery together on a Saturday morning or having a weekly family-movie night.
Did I really want to make the house my domain? Did I want to cook and clean and schlep my kids to all their playdates and activities? Or did I believe that I should want those things? Honestly, I wasn’t sure how much would change at home if our salaries were similar. While I loved spending time with our kids, I didn’t need to make dinner for them every night or be at every single one of their sporting events, as long as one of us was there, for them to know I cared about them. And I knew I didn’t want to give up the career I loved (or the income!) to stay home with them, no matter how much my husband was earning. I’m ambitious. It felt good to succeed and to earn enough to help provide a nice life for my family. That wouldn’t change even if my husband got a better-paying job.
The assumption that women should be the ones to curtail their careers to handle the management of the household—or simply try to do it all!—is unrealistic these days. It also devalues the work that women do, both outside and inside the home. It treats a woman’s career as a precursor to marriage and potentially parenthood, not as a decades-long opportunity to build experience, relationships, confidence, capabilities, fulfillment—and wealth. It presumes women will be perfectly willing to cede our independent income to fulfill our duties as wife and mom: a job with endless hours replete with menial tasks but with no vacation days, no time off, and—oh, right—no pay. Or that we will simply pick up a second shift of (unpaid) work if we insist on retaining our jobs. When you think about it like that, it seems almost inconceivable.
And yet . . . Women are still the ones most likely to put their careers on hold—even when they’re high earners. (Moms cut hours and quit working in much higher numbers than dads in the pandemic to care for kids at home.) And even if we work full-time, we’re still taking on most of the household and caregiving duties. Fewer than a third of different-sex couples in a 2016 study had reached approximate equality in sharing housework. According to a 2020 report by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research and Oxfam, women still spend two hours more each day cleaning, cooking, and running household errands. University of Texas researcher Joanna R. Pepin and her colleagues found recently that married mothers actually spend more time on housework than single mothers.
I knew plenty of women who worked full-time and also carried most of the load at home. One friend, Stacy, worked in sales in a New York City suburb. She and her husband both worked full-time—in fact, she earned more than he did—but he still expected her to have dinner on the table when he got home each night, as his own stay-at-home mom had done for him and his family growing up. Stacy was also the one who did all the grocery shopping and often shepherded their two kids around from school to sports practice to social activities. At one point, her family obligations became so great that she had to cut out of work early to squeeze in school pickups or grocery runs and was penalized by her company for not logging enough hours, nearly costing Stacy her job (and the family its main source of income).
And Stacy’s situation isn’t unusual. The Institute for Women’s Policy Research–Oxfam report, which looked at data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Time Use Survey, found that women across the country who work full-time spend 22 percent more time on unpaid household work than men who work exactly the same number of hours outside the home do, on average. Other research has found that women who earn more than their husbands actually take on even more of the household responsibilities, too.
The question is why.