The Realest Part Of ‘Younger’ Is Its Portrayal Of The Ways Women Are Screwed Financially

The first episode of the show Younger introduces us to a woman in a bad situation.

Liza Miller is 40, newly divorced and unemployed. Her husband has left her for another woman. She is selling their family home because she can’t afford to keep it. After 15-odd years as a stay at home mum, the industry she once had a promising career in has changed, and moved on without her.

Over the past five seasons of Younger, much has been made about how the most ridiculous show on television actually makes some pretty salient points about women, the workforce and ageism.

But when it began airing again last month, I was reminded of another piece of writing. A couple of years ago, Jane Gilmore published a piece for the Queen Victoria Women Centre called ‘The cost of womanhood’.

In it, she lays out a hypothetical scenario in which a man and woman marry, have children and eventually divorce. Despite the fact that their assets are divided when they split, the woman, who quit her job to raise their children, ends up struggling to pay rent while the man enjoys a comfortable existence. Her years out of work mean she’s now only able to find entry-level admin jobs and has been left with a superannuation balance too low to get by on.

The kicker, Gilmore explains, is that this isn’t really just a hypothetical.

It’s the reality for many women who split from their partners after having children, women just like Liza.

A Wake Up Call

When Gilmore’s article first came out in 2017 it was shared with wide-eyed horror between me and my female friends, some of whom recognised their own divorced parents in the hypothetical couple — fathers who are doing just fine, but mothers who will struggle financially for the rest of their lives.

I sent it to my own Mum, mercifully still married to my Dad, who told me the situation felt true of many of her friends who had separated from their husbands mid-life.

Reading that article was a jolt to the system.

It turned me from someone who couldn’t tell you what super fund I was with, let alone what my balance was, into a money obsessive who worries deeply and daily about my future.

For me, Gilmore’s piece laid hideously bare the financial risk that parenting and heterosexual relationships put women in; and women who aren’t white or able-bodied are in a far more precarious situation than I.

Get your viewing essentials ready! It's time for #YoungerTV. @sfosternyc pic.twitter.com/c0LU8PWUR8

— #YoungerTV (@YoungerTV) July 11, 2019

The World Is Unfair

In that first episode of Younger, Liza vents about her situation to a friend who tells her, sympathetically, “You did the right thing for the time”.

It’s true. For our mothers’ generation — who are older than our fictional heroine, but not by much — getting hitched with the expectation it would last forever was what people did. They coupled off at a time when marriage really was, for most people, ‘til death do us part.

Then the game changed when they were mid-play.

There is a lot about the world we’ve inherited that feels unfair, but one advantage women my age have, at least, is the chance to learn from how so many of our mothers were duped out of financial security.

Maybe Younger is the allegory my generation needed for how heterosexual partnerships so often fail women. Pretending to be 26 to nab an assistant job in publishing might have worked (so far) for Liza, but it’s no solution for those of us in the real world.

If you want something to count on, make it the fact that the average Australian marriage now lasts nine years, not a lifetime.

Life Lessons From Younger

There is no foolproof way to safeguard yourself for the future.

Individuals can only do so much in a flawed, patriarchal framework and while trying to build up your super balance while you’re young definitely helps (please do this!) it’s no silver bullet.

I can’t be sure that if I have children, I’ll be able to remain at work while I raise them. I don’t know if I’ll have a partner with me for the ride or if I do, that he’d be willing or able to evenly split the labour of parenting with me.

Men leave, relationships fail, shit happens, but it doesn’t mean I won’t try. Life is a game of risk and it’s better to play it than to sit it out in fear.

But I can, at least, go in with eyes open and prepare for the worst even as I hope for the best.

It’s not much, but it’s more of a head-start than many women before me had.

Younger is currently steaming on Stan.

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Katie Cunningham is the co-host of the money podcast Frugal Forever and a freelance writer based in Sydney. She is on Twitter.