Written by Courtney Davies

Kris Jenner revealed that she “never paid a bill” while married to Robert Kardashian, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. Her “turning point” was during a conversation with a friend that left her ‘embarrassed’.

Kris told The Wall Street Journal: “One day, my friend Shelli Azoff said to me, when I was going through my divorce, ‘How much is your gardener?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know’, and she said, ‘you don’t know?’” Jenner then admitted “that was the turning point for me: I was so embarrassed that I didn’t know.”

She was with Robert Kardashian for four years before they got married in 1978. They later split up in 1991, when she was in her mid-thirties.

“I woke up one day to responsibilities that I hadn’t had the day before. And I needed to figure it out”, Kris told WSJ. She added that it was “such an enormous sense of accomplishment to be able to figure it all out and pay my own bills and make my own money and do my own taxes.”

“And there were times when I didn’t have a lot of money, but I was very organized.”

Since then, Kris Jenner has built not only a name for herself, but she has also become a very successful businesswomen and known as a “momager” – the mother of a famous person who is also their manager. In 2020, Forbes estimated that her net worth was $190M and that she earns about $100,000 for each episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

Kris came up with the idea of the television show herself and it was first aired in 2007. During the WSJ Magazine’s The One interview series, she admits that her hardest business decision was calling “it quits” after 20 years.

The empire she has created goes further than the show. Her children either have businesses, licensing deals or model, all of which she gets a 10% cut of, according to Forbes. Kim has clothing, beauty and perfume businesses; Kylie has her own beauty and skincare brand; Khloe has a clothing brand; Kourtney has a lifestyle platform; Robert has a sock line and Kendall is a famous model and recently came out with her own tequila brand.

Female entrepreneurship is continuously becoming more popular. According to Legaljobs, women own 12.3 million businesses in the US. Whereas, in 1972, years before Kris and Robert got married, there were only around 402,000 female-owned businesses.

As the fight for gender equality has rose, including the fight for the pay gap, gender roles have slowly slipped away. Now many women pay towards their bills and go to work as well as their partner. Stepping away from previous stereotypes that women stay home, while the man goes to work. However, on some shows and series women are still represented as either having a successful job or a family, not both.

On the WSJ The One interview series, Kris admits that she found the mid-to-late-nineties “rough”, while balancing “being a mom and work.” She said: “I think I was having more kids and trying to find a balance between being a mom and work and trying to really establish what my career path was going to be.”

Jenner went on to add that these past years have been “wild”. Kris said: “I started filming Keeping Up with The Kardashians when I was 52 years old, and the stuff that we have accomplished and done and been a part of and experienced since I’m 52 years old, it’s wild.”

Although the show is on its final season, I am sure we will still see a lot of the Kardashian-Jenner household. The final season of Keeping Up with the Kardashians is available to stream and download on Hayu, or you can watch it on E! Network.

Featured images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. No changes have been made to these images.