Victoria Harris : Maybe I don’t need a husband. Maybe I need a wife.

What unpaid care, ambition and the “having it all” myth really cost women.

As a 37-year-old woman in finance, I constantly get asked when I'm going to have kids. 

For a long time, the honest answer was all about finding the right partner. But now? After founding two businesses across the UK and New Zealand, co-hosting an award-winning podcast, managing a growing team, launching our own fund investing other people's wealth, as well as trying to be a present friend, family member and dog mum on top of it all, the honest answer is different: there is absolutely no way I'd have the capacity right now.

Unless I had a wife at home.

A wife, in the 1950s sense. Someone cooking the family dinners, booking the appointments, running the entire invisible operation of my life so I could still make sure my professional life still thrives too. 

Yes, that’s probably the most unfeminist thing I could say, especially running a business that essentially exists to financially empower women. 

Images : Jill Sander Fall Winter 2026 by @simonebellottifeat. @ediecampbell shot by @monibelle

Changing the infrastructure

Globally, the percentage of female fund managers has sat at around 12% for two decades. This is saying that just over 10% of global wealth is managed by women. A recent Morningstar survey also found of roughly 10,000 US funds, fewer than 2% were run by all-women teams at the end of 2022. And before anyone reaches for the "maybe women just aren't as good at it" theory: Morningstar's own research shows no significant relationship between a manager's gender and fund performance. The talent is equal. The representation is not. So the question worth asking is why.

So many of the people I came up alongside in funds management had someone at home holding the rest of life together. The dinners, the school runs, the dentist appointments, the birthday presents, the emotional admin of an entire household. That invisible infrastructure is worth tens of thousands of dollars a year (sometimes hundreds!) if you had to pay for it, and it's what lets someone pour eighty hours a week into a finance career, and swiftly move up the ladder, without everything else quietly collapsing.

Most women, no matter what the industry, don't have that. We are the infrastructure. We build our careers while also being the person who remembers the dentist appointments, and then we're told the gap in our pay, our KiwiSaver, our wealth is a mystery. It's not a mystery. It's maths. Every year a woman earns less, invests less, or steps back to carry the load, the gap between her wealth and his compounds. We talk about compound interest as the eighth wonder of the world when it's working for you. Nobody mentions it works just as hard against you.

And don't get me started on the fury I feel when I hear "she took him for half in the divorce." Took? Add up the job description honestly: the nanny, the cleaner, the cook, the accountant, the events manager, the on-call nurse, the person running the family's entire logistics operation. If you hired all of that out, most households couldn't afford it. Half doesn't sound like taking to me. It sounds like an invoice, finally paid.

Credit where it's owed

Before this reads as a piece about men being the problem, let me be clear: it isn't. The system is the problem.

I know of incredible men who do the school runs and remember the birthday presents so their partners can chase the big job. There are also single dads running the entire invisible operation solo, with nobody clapping for them either. And their numbers are growing: nearly one in five stay-at-home parents in the US is now a dad, and fathers' leave-taking has roughly tripled since 2019 in American states that introduced paid leave. When the infrastructure exists, men use it.

Across countries with data, men make up only about one in four users of paid parental leave, and the biggest reasons are the same trap in reverse: fathers often earn more, so household income takes a bigger hit if they're the one who steps back, and workplace cultures still treat a man taking leave as a career risk. The invoice for care work is real whoever pays it. This was never women versus men. It's everyone versus a system that pretends the CEO of the household doesn't exist.

The goal I don't say out loud enough

One of my biggest life goals is to have my own family and be a mother. I can't think of anything more rewarding than having your heart living outside of you, watching a small person become themselves, and getting to love them through every version.

And that's where the two truths collide. The thing I want most and the career I've spent years building, will be competing for the same finite resource: me.

We're told we can have it all, and technically we can, as long as we're willing to do it all too. Or as the line echoed by Michelle Obama goes: you can have it all, just not all at the same time. So we delay, and delaying has a cost. Or we go earlier, and that has a cost too: years out of the workforce, the part-time penalty, retirement savings that never catch up. Researchers call it the motherhood penalty. In the first five years of parenthood, women's earnings fall by more than half on average. Men's don't move. I call it the tax on wanting both, and right now statistically it's a tax mostly one gender pays.

“you can have it all, just not all at the same time. So we delay, and delaying has a cost. Or we go earlier, and that has a cost too: years out of the workforce, the part-time penalty, retirement savings that never catch up. “ - Victoria Harris

The interesting dichotomy

No being a business owner, building my own team in the finance industry, I sit on the other side of the table. I'm the one writing the policies. I want to create the most supportive environment possible and prove that people flourish when someone builds them the appropriate infrastructure.

Which is why I watched what happened to DISSH so closely. The Australian retail brand announced one of the most progressive parental leave policies I've ever seen: an extra two weeks of paid leave every year for parents of kids under twelve, paid leave for fertility treatment, superannuation still paid while you're on leave. A policy that treats parenthood as a continuum rather than a twelve-week event, built so parents don't wear the earnings penalty.

And you know what? The uproar was insane. "Do I get an extra two weeks for not having kids?" "Why should the child-free pick up the slack?" A company finally builds the infrastructure, and the loudest response is workers fighting each other for scraps instead of asking why the scraps are so small everywhere else. That's what decades of unsupported working parents does to a culture. It teaches us to see support as a prize somebody else won, rather than a baseline everybody deserves. The enemy was never the mum leaving at 2:30pm for school pickup, or the dad who does. The enemy is a system that made them feel like they had to apologise for it.

"Do I get an extra two weeks for not having kids?" "Why should the child-free pick up the slack?" A company finally builds the infrastructure, and the loudest response is workers fighting each other for scraps instead of asking why the scraps are so small everywhere else.”

We're fighters

As someone who hasn't had children yet, I know I'll never fully understand the load until I do. But that doesn't mean I can't fight. And this fight has never belonged to women alone. Every dad who takes his full leave and talks about it openly makes it easier for the next one. Every man who normalises leaving at 2:30pm to pick up the kids moves the line for everyone.

We fought for the right to vote, and New Zealand women got there first, in 1893, before anywhere else on Earth. We fought for the right to make decisions about our own bodies. We fought to get a credit card without a male signatory, and that was within living memory. In the space of one lifetime, women have gone from needing a man's permission to open an account to running funds, founding companies, and leading countries. New Zealand's gender pay gap has nearly halved since we started measuring it. More women are investing than ever before, and globally, women are on track to control more wealth in the next decade than at any point in history.

That's incredible. And it happened because men and women before us refused to accept that the way things were was the way things had to be.

You can see the next chapter being written already; when the structures don't work for us, we build our own. It's why so many women are becoming founders, creating environments on their own terms. New Zealand punches well above its weight here. A global study found New Zealand has the highest percentage of women graduates founding start-ups anywhere, and roughly a quarter of all Kiwi founders are women. We're not waiting for permission to redesign work. We're just doing it.

So imagine the next fifty years. Imagine parental leave policies like DISSH's being so ordinary they don't make headlines. Imagine 12% of fund managers being a statistic our daughters read about in disbelief, the way we read about needing a male signatory. Imagine the CEO of the household, whoever holds the job, being valued like the job it is.

Because here's the real ending to the joke I opened with. I don't actually want a wife at home. I want a world where nobody needs one. Where the invisible operation of a life is shared, valued, and priced honestly, and wanting both a career and a family isn't a tax on anyone. We've come so far in such a short space of time. We're fighters. And we keep fighting until this is no longer a fight, but the status quo.

Honestly, I like our odds.

Find out more about Victoria’s work and The Curve here. Follow them on instagram here.

Victoria Harris [Image Supplied]

A note before the comments section finds me: this piece is written from my experience as a woman weighing career and motherhood, but I see you if your story is different. If you're navigating fertility struggles, if you're child-free by choice or not by choice, if you're a dad carrying the load at home, or if the woman/man framing doesn't fit your family or your identity, the fight for a world where care work is valued and nobody pays a penalty for wanting both – that is the point here.