This week, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and his wife MacKenzie announced that they are divorcing. Each is one-half of the world’s richest couple, thanks to Amazon, making their divorce potentially one of the most complicated. It needn’t be: MacKenzie should walk away with a clean half.

This is already the law in Washington state, where the couple lives (they have other residences as well, but Amazon is headquartered in Seattle). In “community property” states like Washington, any assets accumulated during the marriage are communal and divided 50-50 if the marriage ends. The Bezoses have been married for 25 years, before Jeff Bezos started Amazon, making most of the family wealth communal.

But we can predict now that it won’t be so simple.

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What divorces like these show us is how little we value the often invisible and unpaid labor that so many women do to enable their husbands to build wealth and find professional success. We live in a capitalist country, and so we measure value with dollar figures. By that measure, Jeff Bezos is the more valuable member of the Bezos pair, and the one whose contributions to the family, which total in the billions, are more significant. It’s true that financially, Jeff contributed more than a 50% share.

But would he have been able to have a stable, happy family and build a prosperous company without the work of his wife? MacKenzie is a writer who studied at Princeton under Toni Morrison, and was, Morrison said, “one of the best students I’ve ever had in my creative-writing classes”. She has done well, publishing novels and winning an American Book Award. But as the Vogue writer Rebecca Johnson put it in a 2013 profile, MacKenzie’s first book took 10 years to finish, because “she was doing other things during that time – moving cross-country, giving birth to four children (three boys and a girl, ranging in age from seven to 12), helping her husband start a fledgling business called Amazon.com”.

She met Jeff because they worked in neighboring offices at a Manhattan hedge fund – the kind of job usually staffed by ambitious people who either are or go on to be very wealthy. They were married within six months, when she was just 23, and moved to Seattle soon after.

MacKenzie, in other words, made significant sacrifices to make Amazon work. Bezos’s friend Danny Hills told Vogue, “Family is very important to Jeff, and he absolutely relies on her to create that stable home life.” That meant giving up writing for a decade or so in order to raise the couple’s children. She took charge of homeschooling for a while, and coordinated travel, lessons, social calendars and various enrichment activities – a full-time job when you have four children. Her own career was stymied so that her husband’s could flourish.

This is often framed as a personal choice, but for many heterosexual couples, it’s more of a foregone conclusion. It’s rare that you see men making the “choice” to scale back their ambitions and radically decrease their earnings so that they can be home with their kids; women are much more likely to take on that role, and men are much more likely to expect their wives to do just that. That creates a nuclear family economic unit that gives men the ability to focus nearly all of their efforts on their work for pay. Their wives worry about everything else. That means the husbands in the equation can make more and become ever more successful – and then take all of the credit for doing it themselves. Women agree out of trust that their husbands will do the right thing and support the family unit.

If marriage is a team effort and couples make work choices in order to keep the unit running smoothly, then that should apply in divorce as well. But when it’s time to file divorce papers, it seems nearly every man who once said “being a mom is the most important job in the world” suddenly sees his contributions as more valuable. And it’s not just the soon-to-be ex-husband whose tune changes: we live in a culture that glorifies motherhood without actually supporting mothers and is harsh on moms who work demanding jobs; we are also quick to attack divorcing women who seek family assets they didn’t “earn”. Just watch: if she goes for half, MacKenzie Bezos will be swiftly branded a gold digger.

The Bezoses will probably settle their divorce quietly. But I hope MacKenzie fights for a share of their assets that is consonant with her quarter-century of work, and I hope Jeff is a fair enough person to recognize her contributions – which amount to half of what the couple has.