It's All Relative with Dr Eliza Filby

Women are earning more than men in more relationships. So why does being the breadwinner still feel like a trap?Female breadwinners, women earning more than their husbands, the mental load, mankeeping, gender roles and the economics of marriage are changing relationships across Britain and beyond. Dual-income households have become the norm, fathers are doing more domestic work, and women have achieved extraordinary financial independence. Yet the transition is proving much harder than many of us expected, particularly once children arrive.We daughters of feminists were taught to compete with men. But nobody really taught us what happens when we start winning.I grew up in the 1980s with a breadwinner mother and a stay-at-home father. My dad was incredibly proud of my mother's success. He celebrated her achievements publicly, and they seemed to make this rather unconventional arrangement work beautifully.So when I found myself in exactly the same position, why did I struggle so much?

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We’ve spent years talking about the motherhood penalty. It’s time we talked about the eldercare penalty.The number of childfree women and women without children is rising, raising some fascinating questions about money, pensions, eldercare, inheritance, retirement and the motherhood penalty. At first glance, women without children appear to have a significant financial advantage: no career break for motherhood, higher pension wealth and greater economic independence. But follow that story into midlife and old age and the picture becomes much more complicated.

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Have I saved enough for retirement? Perhaps we should also be asking: who do I want to spend retirement with?We talk endlessly about retirement planning, pensions, financial security, ageing and longevity.

But there's another form of retirement planning we rarely discuss: friendship.

As Millennials and Gen X think about later life, female friendship, co-housing, communal living and the loneliness epidemic are becoming part of the conversation. And for women in particular, who live longer and are more likely to live alone in older age, perhaps we need to start investing in our friendships with the same seriousness that we invest in our pensions.

I started thinking about this because of my mother. She's in her 80s and lives alone in South London. But she isn't lonely. Her spare room resembles a left-luggage department because it's permanently filled with the suitcases of friends and family coming to stay. I recently walked in on her, her sister and one of her closest friends drinking port and cackling like teenagers.

Watching them, I realised something. My mother has created the 1970s feminist dream of the female commune almost by accident. And she's reaping the rewards of 50, 60, even 70 years invested in friendship.

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Women and men don't start the working day with the same relationship to time and we rarely talk about it.The pink tax, female time penalty, mental load, women at work, gender inequality, emotional labour, workplace productivity and AI are usually discussed as separate issues. I think they're connected. Women spend more time getting ready, more time organising family life and, often, more time doing the listening, mentoring and emotional work that keeps workplaces functioning. None of this fits particularly neatly into a culture obsessed with productivity, efficiency and measurable outputs.And that's what I talk about in this episode of It's All Relative: not simply the financial cost of being a woman, but the cost in time.It started with something very ordinary.Getting ready.

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The housing ladder is broken. For Millennials and Gen Z, buying a home increasingly requires a leap.The UK housing crisis, first-time buyers, house prices, mortgages, renting, the Bank of Mum and Dad, and inheritance have fundamentally changed what home ownership means. For previous generations, the property ladder promised gradual progress: buy a flat, build equity, trade up to a family home. For many Millennials and Gen Z, that ladder simply doesn't exist anymore.I started thinking about this when I moved house.I was surrounded by removal boxes, crying while writing the essay that became this episode. Suggest we remove this bit: 'sitting on a chaise', I had lived in that house, on and off, since I was 21. I wrote my PhD there. I moved back after my father died. I raised my family there. My children were conceived there.And leaving it made me think about how strangely we talk about housing.We've spent decades talking about property as an investment. Getting on the ladder. Moving up the ladder. Building equity. Making the "right" property decisions.But a house is also something much more fundamental.It's a home.And I think younger generations are rediscovering that distinction, partly because the economics of housing have changed so dramatically.

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Do you still lie to your parents about money? Even in your 40s? You are definitely not alone.The Bank of Mum and Dad, inheritance, generational wealth, financial independence, family money and the cost of living are changing the relationship between parents and their adult children. We talk a lot about the inequality created by parental wealth, but much less about what happens inside families when money changes hands.Because accepting money from your parents in adulthood can come with something else: scrutiny.This episode started with a reflection on a conversation I had with a woman in her 40s who admitted that she and her husband regularly agree a story before talking to her in-laws.The £150 Vinted dress? It was a bargain.The holiday? Avios.The expensive birthday party? Best not mention exactly what that cost.And these are financially successful, middle-aged adults.Once I started asking around, I realised how common this strange financial fibbing is. Research cited in the episode found that 29% of adults who had borrowed money from their parents admitted lying at least once about what the money was for.So why are grown adults still lying to their parents about money?I think it tells us something important about the rise of the Bank of Mum and Dad.

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Elon Musk thinks we will have AI Abundance in 10 years. Everyone is asking whether AI will replace jobs. The AI bubble is potentially on the horizon. Beyond the hype and the panic however, is the more interesting question: what is AI revealing about the way we work today?Over the past few weeks, I've become increasingly convinced that we're focusing on the wrong AI story.Yes, artificial intelligence is changing work. Yes, it's making us more productive. And yes, it's transforming everything from recruitment to customer service.But the biggest impact of AI isn't what it's creating.It's what it's exposing.In this episode of It's All Relative, I explore three trends that are reshaping the workplace: the rise of employee surveillance, the explosion of shadow AI, and the surprising fact that Gen Z may be the generation asking the toughest questions about artificial intelligence.Taken together, they tell us something much bigger about the future of work.They reveal a workplace that has become increasingly digital, increasingly data-driven and, in many cases, increasingly disconnected from the very human relationships that make people better at their jobs.

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I address the gender divide, the manosphere, the femosphere, dating, social media algorithms, birth rates, and loneliness in this episode.Are men and women still living in the same world, or are our phones creating entirely different realities?I didn't set out to make an episode about the gender divide.It emerged after two completely different conversations. One was with demographer Dr Paul Morland about falling birth rates. The other was with Professor Jilly Kay about the rise of the femosphere. On the surface, they had almost nothing in common.Then we read the comments and analysed them.What struck me was that men and women were often watching the same interview and coming away with completely different interpretations. It made me wonder whether the biggest divide online today isn't political at all....but gender.
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Which profession earns the most? Corporate lawyers, doctors, teachers, Tech? In the context of the housing crisis, the Bank of Mum and Dad, social mobility, and the future of work. If the cost of everything has gone up, who can still afford life on a salary alone?That was the question that sparked this episode.A few months ago, my team and I analysed a simple idea: if house prices, childcare, education and healthcare have all raced ahead of wages, which professions have actually kept up? Which profession earns the most?We often assume it's bankers who have come out on top. But the real winners have been corporate lawyers. Their salaries have continued to rise in the UK, largely because of fierce competition between US and UK law firms, while many other professions have watched their earning power steadily erode.This episode is about what their success tells us about the changing nature of work, wealth and opportunity.
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Gen Z, AI, the future of work, hybrid working, graduate jobs and career advice. Why has an entire generation been labelled lazy when the real story is that work itself has fundamentally changed?

Every time I speak to senior leaders, the same questions come up.

Why won't Gen Z come into the office?

Why don't they stay in jobs?

Why are they so obsessed with work-life balance?

The assumption is always that the problem is Gen Z.

I think the problem is work.

For years, we've talked about younger generations as though they're uniquely entitled or unusually demanding. But if you step back and look at the world they've inherited, a different picture emerges.

They entered the workplace during a global pandemic. Their first experience of work was often through a laptop screen. They watched the Great Resignation unfold, only to find themselves graduating into an economy shaped by AI, hiring freezes and rising economic uncertainty. At the same time, wages have struggled to keep pace with the soaring cost of housing, education and everyday life.

So perhaps the more interesting question is why we expect them to behave as though work hasn't changed.In this episode of It's All Relative, I explore why I think we've misunderstood an entire generation.

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