Are 50/50 relationships fair for women? A sociologist weighs in

It’s complicated.

I get conflicting advice about who should pay for the first date all the time. Some people say it should be split half-half. Others say whoever initiates the date bears the obligation. A shrinking minority says it’s only proper etiquette for the man in the relationship to pay (if we’re strictly talking about heterosexual relationships, that is).

I’ve only ever been on one first date, so I think it’s too small a sample size for me to impart my own advice – not that I think it’s overtly important who ends up paying anyway. But this made me think about how we divide expenses in a relationship further down the track.

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I sometimes get the feeling it’s my feminist duty to demonstrate to the world that I don’t need to be taken care of by anyone. Naturally, this means that when it comes to paying the bills, I’m taking my seat at the table and paying for my own share – like any man would.

But I’ve come to realise an unfortunate fallacy in my logic. No matter how you spin it, men and women still aren’t treated as equals. As a young woman on the cusp of entering the workforce, I’m staring down fewer career opportunities, bias in hiring and pay decisions and a disproportionate share of domestic work. So how is it fair for me and my male partner to contribute the same amount when I’m inherently in a disadvantaged position?

There’s an emerging sentiment that perhaps the 50/50 relationship isn’t as fair as we believe it to be. Particularly when we factor in the amount of unpaid household chores women do compared to their partners.

Ultimately, this is a question for every individual to decide for themselves. But I think it’s crucial for us, as young women, to inform ourselves about how the patriarchy moves in today’s society, especially when it affects the money we earn. So I spoke to Leah Ruppanner, a professor in sociology at the University of Melbourne, to help me take a closer look at whether the 50/50 relationship is actually beneficial for women.

The case against

At first glance, 50/50 should be the best way to advance gender equality in our modern society. After all, as modern-day women, we’re standing on the shoulders of the women who came before us, the ones who fought tirelessly for opportunities to prove just how capable and intelligent the ‘second sex’ could be.

It’s almost like we’ve earned our right to contribute and that shouldn’t be taken lightly. But the whole premise of 50/50 distribution relies on the assumption that we’ve already achieved economic equality with men. And that is laughably untrue. We’re still on the losing end of a gender pay gap and facing massive hurdles in career progression – throw in children to the mix and it’s clear who’s been dealt the better hand.

Thankfully, the days of women doing all the housework and men earning all the income are long gone. Still, every single year without fail, Australian women are shown to do more unpaid housework than Australian men. The reality for women is they’re expected to do most of the housework and shoulder the burden of financial contributions too now.

In this sense, the 50/50 relationship is a myth, because although women may pay their equal share of a numerical bill, men aren’t exactly stepping up at home to cover for the unpaid labour in a relationship.

So if we always end up doing more at home, why shouldn’t men do their fair share and pay for the bills? If we’re going to do most of the chores and earn less money, why not make things easier on ourselves? Leah says taking this approach may actually be “quite powerful” as it raises the visibility of inequality.

“You’re making women’s unpaid work visible, and actually saying this is valuable work. It’s not free work, it has an economic function, and it should be paid – period.” It also has the potential to boost a woman’s independence from her partner by allowing her to save more money and thus create financial freedom for herself.

However, there’s a catch. Your relationship risks becoming transactional in nature and a constant game of scorekeeping. In theory, if the woman doesn’t do housework or fails to do it ‘well enough’, could her boyfriend or husband then justifiably turn around and say “I gave you all that money because you were doing housework. Give me my money back”? That’s clearly problematic.

“On one level, it’s like a feminist statement, on another level, it’s reinforcing this kind of… exchange of unpaid labour for money and in the end, dependency,” Leah says.

The case for

Money is power and in a long-term committed relationship where the man pays for everything, there’s an obvious power imbalance – and it’s not in our favour. By distributing expenses unequally, we risk enforcing traditional gender roles and upholding the patriarchy.

We’ve long buried the idea that women are hapless damsels who have the inherent inability to provide for themselves. But by allowing men to bear the financial costs of a relationship, we might actually be resurrecting this stereotype from the grave and repackaging it under a more palatable pretence.

When you invest the same amount of funds as your significant other, you’re explicitly creating an equal partnership in other aspects of your relationship as well. “You’re putting yourself at the table and saying ‘I’m an equal partner, I have economic power, you have economic power. We come in this with shared resources and so financially we sit as equals’,” Leah says.

But this logic doesn’t come without its faults either. Like it or not, a woman’s money is discounted by the patriarchy and it’s hard to create equality when you’re already down by one (or more realistically, one hundred).

For example, even when women earn more than their boyfriends or husbands, they still have less bargaining power when it comes to getting them to pick up more chores around the house. “If he earns more, she does more [at home] but if she earns more, the evidence is that women still do more housework,” Leah explains to me.

To overcompensate for the fact that the man is not the breadwinner, the woman will typically not ask him to do housework. Given what we know about toxic masculinity and how women are conditioned to minimise themselves, this isn’t surprising.

Regardless, according to Leah, women tend to have the most fair distribution with their partners when they’re financial equals with each other. “The research is pretty clear… 50/50 sharers tend to have the most equal division of housework, you get the most equality when you’re actually equal financial contributors.”

The takeaway

In reality, a 50/50 split isn’t something that’s always achievable or even necessarily desirable. The whole premise of a relationship is that you have someone to rely on, both financially and emotionally. “Sometimes your partner or spouse is carrying you and sometimes you’re carrying them… there’s this economy of gratitude, this kind of up and down,” Leah says.

For Leah, spreading feminism into the future is about the inclusion of a diversity of opinions. Both stances have their merits and it’s one of those questions that won’t have a right answer (unfortunately). It’s ultimately not our sole responsibility as women to overcome systematic gender inequality. But we still should do our part in tearing down the blockades that are keeping us away from parity – even if it’s a little above our pay grade.

For more on how to even up your relationship, head here.