Gender Talk: Why the working woman has to work even more at home

When both the man and the woman are equal breadwinners in the family, you would expect that the equality would extend to other areas too. At least that’s what should happen in an ideal world where the scales do not tilt more towards the woman when it comes to responsibilities involved in running a household and instead results in a ‘happy balance’ between the two sexes. 

Unfortunately, that perfect world is still elusive, as an April 2023 study by the Pew Research Center would have us believe. Of course, we have always known it. But it helps to have the data to justify that. For centuries now, archaic and invisible societal rules have laid down that the woman must always take on more than her ‘frail’ shoulders can carry when it comes to work, inside the house. It could be looking after the children, cooking, cleaning, taking them to school, assisting them with their homework, showing up for parent-teacher meetings and so on and so forth. 

That was then. And today when we have women advancing in every sphere of life and making unbounded progress and also smashing the glass ceiling at their workplaces, giving tough competition to their male counterparts, some things have essentially remained the same. 

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When it comes to a woman who is career-oriented and yet there is no escape from the traditional role of the prime caregiver and caretaker of the family unit, work becomes double, triple and sometimes a tad impossible to carry if there is no family support system or help in the form of alternative caretakers.  
  
That you go to the office, work as hard as your husband and yet have to come back home to a pile of dirty dishes and the laundry to be done and a million other chores while he is exempted from doing any of this work is what is the current state of affairs in most parts of the world. And while the world has progressed beyond leaps and bounds and women are shining and reaching the top in every career one could dream of, this home truth refuses to change.

The recent survey by the Pew Research Center on working heterosexual married couples in the US is, but the tip of the iceberg that shows that despite earning equal incomes, husbands tend to have fewer household responsibilities than wives. In the survey, it was detailed that 29 per cent of married heterosexual couples were the ones where the man and woman earned the same. And yet it found that men spent more time in leisure activities than women, almost 3 and a half hours more per week, while women spend almost 2 and a half hours more per week than the men doing chores in the house. 

Even as men remain the main breadwinner in a majority of opposite-sex marriages, the share of women who earn as much as or significantly more has roughly tripled over the past 50 years. Women are earning more, but they're still doing more housework. This gender disparity shows no signs of going away.

With both sexes being equal financial contributors, there is a huge imbalance in how they balance out the work at home. According to the European Union’s Knowledge Centre on Gender Equality Index 2021, gender differences in household chores are entrenched from childhood. The most unequally shared is of course housework and the other two are childcare and long-term care for older people and people with disabilities and other chronic conditions.

It says that about 91 per cent of women with children spend at least an hour per day on housework, compared with 30 per cent of men with children. The latest data shows that employed women spend about 2.3 hours daily on housework; for employed men, this figure is 1.6 hours. Reasons can be anything from seeing parental role models as entrenching gender roles in terms of housework responsibilities or even traditional expectations from women to be the nurturer and caregiver in marriages. Therefore this role remains static and has not evolved throughout the centuries, at least among the majority of people.

Ideally if both the husband and wife work and earn, the division of household responsibilities should be equal because they have equal work commitments irrespective of their pay. But it remains a fantasy for most as women are expected to be the prime caregiver and men are exempted from such a burden.

In an article in the Guardian, gender expert Kate Mangino, whose book, Equal Partners: Improving Gender Equality at Home, studied men who were equal partners in household work. She said she wanted to find out why these men were unusual. What she found out was that these men had not grown up seeing their dads be equal partners; instead, it was a choice they adopted and that meant there was hope for other men who have been shunning equal responsibilities at home. A fresh new perspective that spells hope? That really depends on how much progress will we be making in the coming years in obliterating the gender divide when it comes to doing household chores. 

As the world marches on in its struggle for equality, this trend as of now, shows no signs of changing. If we look at data from the Office for National Statistics in Britain in 2016, women did almost 60 per cent more of unpaid work, on average, than men. Even in places like Sweden where most men were choosing full-time fatherhood, women were averaging 45 more daily minutes of chores, according to the Guardian. 

What’s the issue really? Are men just jerks when it comes to helping around the house and would they rather pretend to make the beds, wash the dishes, vacuum the floor and then get all hot and bothered and prefer to sit and guzzle a beer and stay glued to the idiot box? Well, it's not that simple. 

Some studies say that one of the reasons could also be because of the insufficiently high standards that most female partners have where they feel that they can do the job better and therefore they take on more than they can chew. The result is an unending workload. 

The solution? Don’t do it. At least when it comes to household chores and the career woman, there seems to be only one choice. That’s also what writer Stephen Marche seems to say in his best-selling book called The Unmade Bed: The Messy Truth About Men and Women in the 21st Century, and that is to avoid the chores to get maximum productivity in other spheres of life.

It all seems to make sense when you hear what famed writer JK Rowling said in a BBC documentary on being asked how she’d found time to write the first Harry Potter book while raising a baby alone. She says: “I didn’t do housework for four years.”

Some hope and a bit of squalor? Take it or leave it.

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