Tech executive Sheryl Sandberg is criticizing “tradwives,” saying the push for women to stay out of the workforce sends a harmful message and reinforces what she calls “sexist” stereotypes.
“Tradwives,” or traditional wives, is a term used to describe a subculture of female online content creators who believe in clear gender roles and who share their homemaker lifestyles on social media.
Sandberg, the former chief operating officer of Meta, argues that most women need to work outside the home to financially support their families, and she believes the traditional movement shames working women who can’t afford to stay home.
“The message that is going out is that, in order to be a good wife or a good mother, you need to do it full-time,” she told People magazine in a story published Wednesday. “And the truth is that that is a decision almost no women can afford to make.”
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“If you look at the percentages of women who need to work outside of the home to support their families, it’s the great majority of women,” she continued. “And so these messages that ‘This is how you have a successful marriage, that this is how you have six children,’ I think, are very detrimental to women.”
She also worried the movement was a regressive pivot to “very, very sexist” gender roles.
“We need to be realistic, and we need to not use new ideas to reinforce what are old, outdated and very, very, very sexist notions of what roles are,” she said. “Let’s be clear: You are not harming your marriage, and you are not harming your children by working and by being ambitious.”
Sandberg acknowledged that women who promote this lifestyle online aren’t intending to send a harmful message but said she still believes the trend “inadvertently” limits women’s “ambition.”
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Still, she said she supports women who want to be stay-at-home moms and can afford to do so.
“If you have the resources, and you want to be a tradwife, that’s great,” she told People. “That’s for you to decide.”
The tradwife trend gained steam during 2023 and 2024 and drew praise and criticism from cultural commentators and media outlets.
In 2024, NFL kicker Harrison Butker went viral for his commencement speech praising homemaking as one of the most important vocations for women, earning praise from some stay-at-home moms who pushed back on critics who viewed them as “oppressed.”
