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It needs to be emphasised: careers, jobs, and professions hold value beyond being a source of income. People can tag these honest conversations as “Gender Wars,” but a significant number of men don’t even consider wives to be family members.
Work gives people structure, routine, exposure, community, socialisation, personal development, confidence, opportunities, networks, and access to experiences they may otherwise never encounter. These things have value:
1. My academic career is probably one of the main reasons I have been able to travel across the United States in the name of conferences, workshops, and professional development. Next summer, I’m doing a one-week study abroad in either Italy or Paris. If a man took you there right now, he’d want to suck your breast first!
2. My work as a creative consultant with the Ministry of Tourism in 2017–2018 gave me the opportunity to travel to Bali—a premium international tourism destination—and study there for three whole months. All expenses paid!
3. The year I consulted for a U.S. K–12 institution was the first time I drove some luxury vehicles. They were company cars that were available to use for various professional development trainings outside the city I lived in.
4. The years I interned at different radio, television, and advertising agencies gave me the opportunity to see parts of Ghana I might otherwise never have encountered. Those experiences exposed me to communities, industries, and developmental realities that expanded my understanding of my own country.
This is why I find it so disturbing how women’s autonomy, careers, intellectual development, and personal ambitions are so often relegated to the back burner the moment marriage and childbirth enter the picture. Marriage and motherhood should not be a death sentence for a woman’s dreams! If men truly cared about women like that, they would take turns in quitting their jobs to be more present at home.
Raising children is chaotic, overstimulating, exhausting, and relentless. Women, just like men, deserve third spaces—places, relationships, institutions, and activities outside the home and caregiving responsibilities where they can breathe, develop, socialise, learn, create, and pour back into themselves.
And men know this.
That is partly why so many men can immerse themselves in work obligations for decades under the banner of “providing financially.” Work provides them with purpose, identity, structure, socialisation, recognition, and an escape from the demands of domestic life.
If men genuinely desired to be deeply involved in raising their children, why haven’t more men collectively demanded work structures that accommodate active fatherhood? Why is the pressure for flexibility, less demanding jobs, reduced hours, parental leave, remote work, and career adjustments so often framed as something women need?
Why don’t we see the same urgency from men to say, “I want to be present for my children, so our institutions need to make room for fathers too”? And, historically, men don’t even have a good record for holding their end of the bargain after their wives have made these sacrifices. This is why, as a woman, I am not interested in hearing that I should simply “trust my man.”
Unless a woman’s time away from work is state-supported, adequately funded, and legally protected, voluntarily stepping away from a career to become the primary caregiver remains a significant personal and economic risk.
- You can love your husband.
- You can trust your husband.
- You can have the best marriage in the world.
But you should still understand the structural risk.
Because divorce happens. Death happens. Disability happens. Job loss happens. Infidelity happens. People change. Economies collapse. Relationships end.
And when a woman has spent ten years outside the workforce raising children while her husband has spent those same ten years accumulating income, experience, promotions, professional networks, retirement contributions, and social capital, telling her that she “chose” motherhood as though the consequences are equally distributed is intellectually dishonest.
If men genuinely desired to be primary caregivers at the same scale women are expected to be, our work structures would have evolved much more aggressively to accommodate parenting for both men and women.
This is why childbirth is something women need to think about very seriously—particularly if you live in a country where the social and economic infrastructure does not adequately protect women who become mothers.
Dear African women, not having children is also a valid choice! You do not have to reproduce simply because marriage, religion, culture, family, or society tells you that this is what a “complete” woman does.
You live in some of the most unserious countries (leadership- and development-wise) and have some of the most misogynistic men and institutions; wake the fuck up and save yourselves!
Your life is not merely a resource to be transferred from your father’s household to your husband’s household and then consumed by motherhood.
- You are a person.
- Your ambitions matter.
- Your career matters.
- Your intellectual development matters.
- Your friendships matter.
- Your leisure matters.
- Your independence matters.
Motherhood should fit into a woman’s life, not swallow the entire thing!
