A new book argues women must think of themselves as ‘providers’ and not just financially independent

I didn’t grow up thinking I might have to be the breadwinner. I grew up knowing I already was.

We’re two sisters. No son. Which in India means the “what a son would do” column became ours. Our parents never said it outright, but it was understood; if a brother existed, I know the picture would look different. We’d still be “encouraged to be independent”, sure. But the fierce ownership over finances, our own and our family’s, wouldn’t have been ours to claim so fully.

Sometimes I spiral into the counterfactual: Who would I be if that sense of accountability hadn’t been placed squarely on my shoulders? If I was cushioned by someone else’s assumed role as provider? So much of my personality, like my grit, my obsession with autonomy, my paranoia about fragility, was forged in that absence.

Most of us are walking around with a dangerous assumption. We think someone else will catch us if we fall. We think our salaries are supplementary. We think breadwinning is for other people: the unlucky ones, the ones whose backup plans failed.

We’re wrong.

Let me tell you about the messages we absorbed growing up. Not the overt ones, because those were actually pretty progressive. “Beta, study hard.” “Get a good job.” “Be independent.” Our parents, especially our mothers, wanted us to have what they didn’t: financial security, options, autonomy, joy, the ability to walk away from bad situations.

But underneath that encouragement was a shadow. A set of assumptions so embedded we didn’t even notice them sneaking in. Your salary is important, but not that important. Someone else, your husband, your family, will handle the “real” financial responsibility. You should be able to support yourself, but you shouldn’t have to. Your money is for you; their money is for us. Financial planning is something you’ll figure out together, later. Your ambition should be tempered by what makes others comfortable.

I see this playing out everywhere. The woman making Rs 15 lakh a year who still asks her husband to “handle” the big financial decisions. The one who contributes to household expenses but isn’t on the house papers. The friend who earns more than her partner but still feels guilty about spending on herself. The girl who undersells both her salary and role to her family. We were raised to be financially capable but not financially responsible. Successful but not too successful.

That programming served a purpose when life was predictable. When marriages lasted forever, when men’s careers followed neat upward trajectories, and when families stayed intact and healthy. But that’s not the world we’re living in any more. And the problem is this – by the time you realise you need to be the breadwinner, you’ve already lost years of compounding. The transition from “supplementary earner” to “person everything depends on” is a psychological, emotional, relational one. It changes how you see yourself and how the world sees you.

So here’s what I wish someone had told me at 22: Assume you’re the breadwinner from day one. Not because you want to be, but because you might need to be. And when that day comes, and it comes for more women than we like to admit, you want to be ready. Not scrambling. Not panicking. Not learning everything from scratch while the bills pile up. Ready.

Khushboo was 31, a marketing manager at a mid-sized company. Her husband was the “ambitious one”, the start-up guy, the big dreamer, the one whose career they both organised their life around. She took the stable corporate job, the predictable growth trajectory, the one with health insurance and annual increments. It made sense at the time. They were building towards something, and her steadiness was the foundation for his risk-taking. She didn’t mind. She believed in him. She believed in them. When his company went under during the pandemic, she suddenly wasn’t just covering her own expenses. It was rent, groceries, his parents’ medical bills, and their daughter’s school fees. “I went from thinking of my salary as ‘my money’ to realising it was everyone’s lifeline,” she told me. “The scariest part wasn’t the financial pressure. It was realising how unprepared I was to make decisions that big. I’d never had to think about whether we could afford something. I’d never sat with our accounts and felt the weight of being the only thing standing between us and disaster.”

Kunjan was 28 and had planned to quit work after marriage. Her in-laws made it clear that was the expectation, and honestly, she was looking forward to it. A break after years of grinding, time to settle into a new life, maybe figure out what she actually wanted. The plan felt romantic, even liberating. She wouldn’t have to answer to a boss any more. She could focus on building a home.

But three months into the marriage, she discovered her husband had Rs 8 lakh in credit card debt he’d hidden throughout their courtship. Suddenly, quitting wasn’t an option. “I had to become the breadwinner to dig us out of a hole I didn’t even know existed,” she says. “The worst part was everyone treating it like it was my fault for ‘not knowing my husband better.”

The statistics confirm what the stories suggest. Divorce reduces women’s household income by about more than a third, compared to 18% for men, and that gap doesn’t close for years. Nearly 40% of mothers are already the primary earners in their households, many of them not by choice but by circumstance. Over half of Indians will face a major financial crisis at some point. Job loss, medical emergency, family collapse. The question isn’t whether a crisis will come. The question is whether you’ll be ready when it does.

Most women are taught that there’s always a safety net. A father, a husband, the family. But that illusion gets more dangerous every year.

We’re still raised with the assumption that marriage equals financial security, but the reality doesn’t support this anymore. Dual-income households are now necessary for middle-class life in most Indian cities. A single salary, even a good one, often can’t cover rent, groceries, school fees, parents’ healthcare, and still leave room for savings. And even in stable marriages, what happens when your partner gets sick? Has a mental health crisis? Decides to change careers? Gets laid off? The “provider” you’ve been counting on might need providing for.

The family safety net is just as fragile. “Your parents will always be there.” Will they? Our parents are living longer, which is beautiful, but it also means longer periods of dependency. They’re retiring with insufficient savings because their generation didn’t have the investment options we do. Healthcare costs are exploding. The idea that they’ll be your safety net ignores the reality that you might be theirs.

And the state? In India, please. The social safety net assumes you have a family to fall back on. The bureaucracy assumes you have a husband to co-sign. Women’s financial vulnerability is built into the system, not protected by it.

The most dangerous fantasy is the one that says “I’m too smart for this to happen to me.” We think financial disaster is for other people – people who made bad choices, who didn’t work hard enough, who weren’t strategic enough, who didn’t know better. But a crisis doesn’t discriminate based on your MBA or your salary bracket. The women I know who became breadwinners overnight weren’t careless. They were trusting. They built their lives around reasonable assumptions that turned out to be wrong. They did everything “right” and still got blindsided.

The fallback isn’t gone. It’s just you. And once you accept that, like really accept it, in your bones and not just your brain, everything gets clearer.

Assuming you’re the breadwinner isn’t about expecting doom. It’s about knowing you’re built to withstand it. There’s a certain sense of calm that comes when you realise if I had to carry it all tomorrow, I could. I wouldn’t crumble. I might resent it, sure. I might rage. But I’d survive.

When you reframe this way, breadwinning becomes less about burden and more about autonomy. You don’t have to carry the whole world, but you know you could, and that knowledge itself gives you leverage. When you know you can support yourself and possibly others, you make different choices. You don’t stay in jobs that crush your soul because you “need the money”. You don’t tolerate disrespect because you can’t afford to leave. You don’t shrink your ambitions because someone else might feel threatened.

Excerpted with permission from The Girls Are Not Fine: The Cost of Ambition, Careers and Becoming, Harnidh Kaur, Penguin Random House India.