You Can Have It All

You can have it all. They actually say that to us. Out loud. With a straight face.

Have the career. Have the babies. Do the school run. Sign up for the after-school clubs and remember which kid needs the PE kit on which day. Keep the house. Book the dentist. Buy the present for the party on Saturday that you also have to drive to. Hold down the job. Be ambitious. Lean in… Girlboss your way to the top.

And smile while you do it. Because look how lucky you are. Look how far women have come.

You can have it all. Except you can’t. It's a con. It was always a con.

Having it all was never an offer. It was a workload. Somebody took the entire weight of running a home and a family, the cooking, the cleaning, the appointments, the emotional admin of a whole household, and instead of sharing it out, they handed women a second job and called it freedom. Have the career AND do all of this. Not instead of. As well as.

It's measured. It's not a feeling, it's a figure. Women in this country still do the best part of an hour more unpaid work every single day than men. Housework, caring, the lot. Nearly an hour, every day, that nobody pays for and nobody sees.[1]

And it isn't just the women at home. Take a woman in a full-time job and a man in a full-time job, same paid hours, and she STILL goes home and does more of the house than he does.[2] The job didn't replace the second shift. It got stacked on top of it. There's even a name for it, because a sociologist clocked this way back in 1989 and called it exactly that, the second shift, and nearly forty years later we're still living in it.[3]

That's not having it all. That's doing it all. There's a difference, and they're banking on you not noticing.

The men held up as proof that you can make it if you just want it badly enough did not do it all. Not even close. They got to the top because someone else was doing the rest. A wife at home holding the whole family together. A PA at work fielding the emails, booking the travel, remembering the birthdays, doing the day-to-day grind that eats your hours alive. Two women, often, clearing the path so one man could walk up it.

And it's no accident that the moment it all tips is the moment a baby arrives. That's the point the whole thing resets. He becomes the breadwinner, she drops her hours, and the gap that follows her for the rest of her working life opens up right there.[4] Nobody handed women a wife. We were told to BE the wife, do the job, raise the kids, and call it empowerment.

And is it any wonder some of these men feel entitled? They've been handed the whole system on a plate and most of them can't even see the plate. They think they got there on merit. They think the field is level because from where they're standing it looks flat. They never had to remember the PE kit. They never lay awake doing the mental maths of everyone else's week. So when a woman says the system is rigged, they're baffled. What system? Worked fine for me. Of course it bloody did. It was built for you!

I think that's where a lot of the anti-feminism comes from. Not always hatred. Sometimes just a man who has never once had to see the scaffolding holding him up, getting defensive the second someone points at it.

I know the con works. Because it worked on me.

It's 8:42pm. The kids are finally down. This is really the only scrap of time I'll get all day, and I'm so tired I can barely think straight, but I want to get my thoughts down and create. I save this work for after they're asleep, when I'm already running on empty, and then I go to bed wrecked and get up and do the whole lot again.

And underneath all of it, the guilt. Not doing enough for the kids. Not doing enough at work. Not doing enough at home. Not doing enough of this. Not enough, full stop. I can’t have it all, however much I try.

That guilt isn't a personal failing. That's the con doing the exact job it was built to do. Sell you something impossible as though it's possible, so that when you can't hold it all up, you blame yourself instead of the thing that loaded you up in the first place. The patriarchy.

You didn't fail at having it all. Having it all was never real. It was patriarchy in a girlboss T-shirt.

So here's what I've started doing. I've started saying no. Out loud.

I can't do everything. They conned us. So I cut things out. Things I used to break my back keeping on top of, I've let go, because the alternative was heading straight for a breakdown and I could feel it coming.

That is not giving up. Carving time out for myself is not me failing the test. It's me refusing to sit the test at all. Refusing to be ground down to nothing so a system that was never built for me can keep ticking over on my exhaustion.

And the stolen hours? The scraps I claw back to do this work, at the kitchen table, after bedtime, with shaking hands? Same refusal. One says I won't be ground down. The other says I won't be silent. Same fight. Same woman refusing to disappear.

Some nights I don't know if the actual rising happens in my lifetime. Or my daughter's. Or her daughter's after her. There might be a lot of burning down before there's any building up.

But I'm not sitting here silently. I'm raging. I'm roaring. I'm carving out the time, both kinds, the time to rest and the time to make. Both are me refusing the lie.

You can have it all? No. But I can have myself back. And that's where it starts.

Receipts

[1] Women in the UK do an average of 57 minutes more unpaid work a day than men, housework, caring and volunteering combined: 3 hours 32 minutes for women against 2 hours 35 minutes for men. Source: ONS Online Time Use Survey, March 2024 (reported by NatCen Social Research).

[2] Even in full-time work the gap holds: employed women do an average of 35 minutes more unpaid household work a day than employed men, before unpaid care is even counted. Source: ONS, Time Use in the UK: March 2023.

[3] The "second shift," the unpaid domestic and caring work women take on at home on top of paid employment, was named and documented by sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild. Source: Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home, 1989.

[4] Becoming a parent is the point at which the gender pay gap opens and widens, as men typically become the main earner and women are far more likely to move to part-time work. Source: House of Commons Library, The Gender Pay Gap (SN07068), 2025.

Sources checked at time of writing. Figures and reports current as of June 2026.

Too much in my head, so I write. So I paint. So I refuse to be quiet.