What’s a divorce worth when one half of the marriage manages a high profile career in the paid workforce, while the other half manages the unpaid work at home?
According to a ruling of the Family Court last week, such a split should be 50/50.
The ruling came via a $40 million divorce between a Gold Coast property developer and his wife. The couple, married for 29 years and with three children, started out with ‘very little’ before the husband established a construction business, and the wife remained active in some aspects of the business but largely became the homemaker and parent. The marriage broke down after an affair between the husband and another women.
While the husband was originally granted 60% of the couple’s assets, the wife deemed this “inherently unjust and unfair”, given her contribution as a parent and in the home.
The Court agreed. As the AFR reported, it overturned the previous 60/40 split, rejected the husband’s appeal for an even greater share on the basis that the wife had been “passive” in her role as a shareholder and director, and upping the wife’s entitlements to half.
According to the full court judgement, the wife’s legal team argued that her role as homemaker and parent meant she was left with the “unfair burden in the economic consequences of role division during marriage.”
Indeed, it’s a burden many women find they carry — although very few have the resources to rectify.
As the court found, the couple had reached the “upper echelons” of wealthy Australia — the part that involves tens of millions of dollars — and the wife’s contribution to their fortune was equal to that of the husband’s. The judgment said: “The wife’s contributions to the welfare of the family are in themselves significant contributions and … does not suggest that one kind of contribution should be treated as less important or valuable than another.”
This raises many important issues about the value, or lack thereof, that we place on unpaid work — especially the type of work that is required to support somebody in pursuing a lucrative career.
Could he, the husband, have been able to pursue such a successful business if he didn’t have a wife? Could he have accumulated such wealth if he didn’t have somebody at home managing the key tasks? Could he have raised three kids? Managed a household? Could he have successfully juggled work and life without somebody around to pick up the pieces?
Having a supportive, stay-at-home partner is a serious career asset. They can empower you to work whenever and wherever you want. They can raise the kids, keep everyone on time, manage nutritional requirements, steps in at the last-minute when somebody gets sick or injured.
But more often than not, such a stay-at-home partner is a career-related perk of a man, rather than a woman. As Annabel Crabb wrote in her book The Wife Drought, 60% of Australian couple families with children under the age of 15 have a father working full time and a mother either working part time or not at all, according to ABS figures. Just 3% of families have these roles reversed.
Like the wealth generated by this couple, so many successful careers can be considered a ‘team effort’. Recognising just what kind of unpaid contributions are necessary for such careers is a big step forward in acknowledging some of the many disadvantages women still face — the most notable one being that very few women actually have a ‘wife.’