“Mum, you need to pay rent,” announced the 12-year-old daughter of Brenda.
Brenda was red-faced. “Did she have to be so loud? Didn’t her daughter not care that her Chama friends were around? And now what will they think about her?” Brenda, 34, seethed.
“The caretaker is outside and wants to speak to you,” her daughter continued as if she had not read her mother’s mortified expression.
“Just a minute,” she excused herself from the dozen friends who were sipping tea and biscuits at her house on a Saturday afternoon.
She gathered courage, walked to the door and was back after some chitchat with the caretaker.
And true to her fear, the girls had also noticed this ‘strange’ demand.
COVETED LIFESTYLE
A Chama member wondered why the girl was coming to her and not her father who was also in the house.
“Do you pay the rent?” another asked, to Brenda’s embarrassment, before going on to give a lecture on why a woman should not pay the family’s rent.
Brenda has heard this lecture before, the first time from her older sister 13-years-ago, just before she and her husband had their traditional wedding.
Her sister had gotten married to a wealthy man a few years before.
She lived in a big house; her child went to a good school, and she had a wardrobe full of expensive clothes.
She ran a small business but her husband catered for all the bills and never asked anything of her. For a while, Brenda and their two younger sisters wanted to be just like her.
“I also noticed how controlling her husband was, almost abusive. Very much like the way our father had been with our mother; he had provided everything for her and in return, demanded total loyalty. I did not want to be my mother,” she recalls.
FINANCIAL FREEDOM
Not wanting to become as powerless as she imagined her mother had been, Brenda strived for financial freedom from young adulthood.
She was running a successful business while in college where she met her husband.
It was the fact that he wasn’t seeking to dominate her that drew her to him.
And when they left college and she got a better job than him, it didn’t bother her.
When they started a family, she quickly slipped into the role of provider, paying the bigger chunk of the bills.
Now that the traditional roles have somewhat merged in their relationship and she brings home the big bucks, how does it work?
Is he the nurturer? Did he wake up to sooth their children at night when they were younger? “Not quite,” she says.
Brenda is still the primary caregiver to their three children; she still does the cooking, washing on days when the house help is away and the wiping of their running noses.
RESEARCH SAYS …
For 13 years, Brenda and her husband have upset the traditional gender roles.
Through that duration, she has heard and read that an arrangement like this could never work. That a man’s ego is too delicate to accept this kind of arrangement.
Word on the street is that a man’s ego is too fragile that when a woman out-earns him, a relationship is bound to crumble.
Studies have been done to support this theory. A 2016 Harvard study concluded that a marriage is 33 per cent more likely to end in divorce if a husband is not employed full-time.
A recent Swedish study found out that career women are likely to be divorced when they outrank their husbands and draw a bigger cheque.
“Being promoted to a top job in politics or business leads to a dramatic increase in the divorce rate for women, but not for men,” writes Johanna Rickne of the report published by LSE Business Review in July 2019.
“I can’t speak for all men. I am sure some men would be unsettled sleeping under a roof they aren’t paying rent for. My man seems happy enough. It’s the people around us that have a problem with our arrangement,” Brenda defends.
CULTURE
It all sounds easy now but Brenda says it wasn’t always. Over the years, the two of them have developed tools to navigate their relationship.
“The first few years I wanted to have the final word, especially when it came to spending, but I saw that this was straining our relationship so I stopped. I am better at making money and he is a better investor and planner so he does that for us,” she explains.
Does she slip him money under the table to pay the bills when they are out in the company of family and friends?
“No. We have a joint account where we each put in our contribution every month. We pay our bills from this account.”
Just how fragile is a man’s ego? We are a generation that was raised hearing that men pay bills and women have babies and nurture them.
It’s a message rooted in Stone Age, wherein patriarchal systems, men brought home the hunt while women took care of the homestead.
With this ‘knowledge’ at the backs of their minds, women go to great lengths to make sure that they only get with men who are better placed financially than they are.
Over the last few decades, more girls have gone to school, earned higher education and occupied corner offices or become founders of multimillion churning start-ups.
JOB PROMOTION
Still, women are wary about perceptions of succeeding more than their men. This is so especially at the homefront.
“When I got promoted at work last year, I hid it from my husband for months,” shares 35-year-old Julia.
When Julia, a marketer, met her husband who works in procurement; he was making more than her. Her career, however, grew faster and more steadily than his.
“I think he was slighted when I told him and I tried not to dwell on it. We are fine, I think, but I do not talk about work too much,” she says.
Is this assumption true? Is a man’s ego bruised when his woman earns more than him?
Is being the achieving partner in a relationship the only way for a man to be happy and stay faithful?
How do men feel about the women in their lives securing the wallet?
A few years ago, getting up early to watch his live-in girlfriend get dressed for work was the favourite part of the day for Erastus Njine, a small business owner.
EDUCATION
They were both in their late 20s. She had a good corporate job and he was just setting up his business, so she paid most of their bills for the three years they lived together.
Asked whether not being able to pay all the bills, especially after they had a child, made him feel like less of a man, he says:
“That is the assumption but a man wants a woman who can look after herself. I was very proud of her and how hard she worked.”
Had the child they shared not died and their different grieving processes put a strain on their relationship, Erastus feels that the two of them would still be together despite their varying earning capabilities.
In comparison to 1963, when girls took up just 25 per cent of enrolment into the school system in Kenya, Unicef estimates that the numbers of enrolment for girls have gone up top 48.4 per cent at the tertiary level.
The woman’s place is no longer barefoot and pregnant at the stove.
It should thus not be a surprise that women are paying the bigger chunk of bills in some homes.
TEAMWORK
When we conducted a dipstick survey on social media, it turned out that there are indeed women who have taken up the role of provider for their families.
Out of 22 women who responded to our question, seven admitted to out-earning their partners. Five reported that they had no qualms doing so.
40-year-old Namulanda could be any of these women. She has paid most of the bills for most of the 20 years she has been married and says that this isn’t a big deal.
She was fresh out of college when she met her husband and he was trying his hand at business.
Her career quickly catapulted when she got a job with a multinational company.
Over the years, they have put their children through school and have even bought a home together.
When she travels for work, which is for most of the year, he holds the fort at home, making sure that homework is done and everyone is fed.
“He is better with the children anyway. He is Mr Mom,” she jokes.
He fully supports her career. She supports his business, sends friends and acquaintances his way when she can.
When he made a bid for MCA in the last elections, she supported him both financially and emotionally.
LIFE LESSONS
Wasn’t she looking for a man who is a leader? “There are many ways for a man to be a leader in the home. It’s not just about money,” she says.
Her husband, she says, has always been the moral compass for their children; he takes them to church and also ensures their physical protection.
“He is very confident in who he is. We all feel physically safe when he is around” she says.
Namulanda and her husband have five children, two of them sons. They say that boys learn how to be men from their fathers.
Isn’t she afraid that her sons are not learning the traditional provider role from their father?
“Their father is a leader. They take their cues from him. He may not have landed a plum job with a huge multinational as I did, but he works hard and they see that. That is all the manhood lessons they need,” she says.
RESENTMENT
While she was raised in the traditional set up where all the pressure was on the man to pay for everything that needed to be paid for, she accepted early on in her marriage that she was always going to be earning more than him.
She is also aware that people around them might not be accepting of their circumstances, so the fact that she brings home the Unga isn’t public knowledge.
“I have met women who tell everyone who will care to listen to how their men can’t pay the bills. This is where resentment stems from. If a woman can’t pay rent for a few months without advertising this fact, then maybe this kind of a relationship isn’t for her,” she says.
Turns out that women being the providers is a phenomenon that is more common than we think.
Also, turns out that there are men who can deal with it. Whether such arrangements will ever become socially acceptable, only time can tell.