GRSJ224/doinggenderathome

Housework and doing gender

Facts

Despite numerous advancements in employment and civil rights equality, women and men are not so equal at home in what housework is concerned. While the situation varies across countries and cultures, research finds that the more inequality exists at a macro-level within a country, the more inequality exists at the micro-level, within the home, as well (Ruppaner & Maume 2016). It is important to understand how gender inequality continues to manifest itself in the home, because "the gendered division of housework is the linchpin in a broader system of gender inequality" (Treas & Tai, 2016, p. 495). While early feminists, like Mary Wollstonecraft, imagined that gender inequality would be over as soon as women would have access to education, that goal hasn't been realized (Treas & Tai, 2016, p. 496). Women continue to take on most of the housework in spite of their having also taken on a large portion of the paid labor, outside of the home (Treas & Tai 2016).

Here are the facts:

A University of Alberta study from 2017 tracked 900 people and surveyed them at the ages of 25, 32 and 43. The study looked not only at who performed the domestic tasks, but also how these decisions were influenced by income, marital status, work hours and childcare. In every age group, women performed more housework than men (Tejada 2017). The study aligned with others from the UK’s Office for National Statistics and Statistics Canada that showed that women did 50% to 60% more housework than men (Tejada 2017)
CBC reported that BC had the smallest gender gap with women doing only 36% more work and the Prairies the highest at 52% (Tejada 2017).
Some studies show that the more women earn, the less housework their partner does (Tejada 2017).
Women do more time intensive and routine tasks such as cooking, laundry and dishes. Men usually do more episodic chores such as mowing the lawn or changing lightbulbs (Rupaner 2016).
Married men who live in more liberal, empowered states or countries do more "housework than those in less empowered and more conservative states" (Ruppaner & Maume, 2016, p.. 26).
Mothers spend a lot more time doing housework than childless women, across all cultures (Ruppaner & Maume 2016, p. 26).
In many households, chores are "sex-typed" so the "female-typed chores include cooking, doing dishes, cleaning, laundry, and grocery shopping, and "male-types" chores include auto maintenance, making repairs, and outdoor chores" (Quadlin & Doan, 2018, p. 790)

Reasons

Because women do the work all the time and are used to their own (often self-imposed) high standards, some of them do not like to delegate because they do not trust their partners to do a good job. For this reason some women would rather ask their children’s help than their partners. Writer Tiffany Dufu calls this “home control disease” (Burkeman 2018).
Women also do more “worry work” – the job of keeping track what needs to be done (Burkeman 2018).
Men do not necessarily want to take advantage of women doing the housework, but some of them do not care as much about a clean house, have different standards of cleanliness, or just do not notice some details (Burkeman 2018).
Even expectations dictate that women should do more housework: in a study in which participants where shown pictures of couples, they consistently chose the woman as best suited for most chores. Even for homosexual couples, most participants chose the partners who seemed more feminine (Cara 2016).
Some women feel a lot of pressure about keeping a clean house at all times and they think that is a reflection of them. There are stuck in norms of femininity and masculinity, norms which are dictated by an overwhelmingly heteronormative society (Weikle 2017).

Consequences

Sometimes spending so much time on housework makes women shy away from demanding, high-paying jobs. The reduced free time translates into a wider gender wage gap, a situation which then, ironically, leads to even less equality within the household (Bloomberg 2017).
A study from UBC found that outsourcing even a small amount of housework for a small budget can contribute to the subjects’ happiness by removing unpleasant tasks (Weikle 2017).
Keeping the work divided between binary lines, such as male-chores and female-chores, promotes the status quo by reinforcing heteronormativity and conformity to patriarchal norms and ideals of masculinity and femininity.
Within the cities - where a very large population lives - the housework reserved for men is drastically reduced as "urban households have relatively little demand for male-types housework" (Quadlin & Doan, 2018, p. 792).

Solutions

Monetize domestic work and hire help to do it. Swedish families get a tax break for that. This reduces the black market labour and raises salaries. Tax breaks in other countries may have positive effects not only in reducing the gender gap but in helping the poor (Ruppaner 2016).
A cultural shift in reducing expectations on women to keep a spotless home (Ruppaner 2016).
Feminism still has a lot of work to do towards promoting gender equality as a goal. Right now, women still do most of the housework, putting on a second shift, even in the most developed and supposedly egalitarian countries in the world, such as Norway and the United Kingdom (Treas & Tai, 2016, p. 495)
Education has a role to play in calling attention to how broader social institutions are continuing to uphold gender inequality, and how intersectional factors, such as race, wealth, and country policies affect the way housework is likely to be divided (Treas & Tai 2016, p. 495-96).

References

Bloomberg (August 1, 2017), “The economic reason why men should do more housework”. Fortune http://fortune.com/2017/08/01/women-men-housework-gender-divide-equality/

Burkeman, O. (February 17, 2018), “Dirty secret: why is there still a housework gender gap?”. The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2018/feb/17/dirty-secret-why-housework-gender-gap

Cara, E. (August 22, 2016) “Who should do the household chores? New research on money and marriage”. Medical Daily https://www.medicaldaily.com/who-should-do-household-chores-new-research-money-and-marriage-395622

Ruppaner, L., & Maume, D. J. (2016). The state of domestic affairs: housework, gender, and state-level institutional logics. Social Science Research, 60, 15-28.

Ruppanner, L. (May 29, 2016), ”We can reduce gender inequality in housework – here’s how”. The Conversation https://theconversation.com/we-can-we-reduce-gender-inequality-in-housework-heres-how-58130

Tejada, C. (September 27, 2017, updated October 19, 2018), “Women still do more chores at home than men, study finds”. Huffington Post https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2017/09/27/women-chores-home_a_23224733/

Treas, J., & Tai, T. (2016). Gender inequality in housework across 20 European nations: Lessons from gender stratification theories. Sex Roles, 74(11), 495-511.

Quadlin, N., & Doan, L. (2018). Sex-types chores and the city: Gender, urbanicity, and housework. Gender & Society, 32(6), 789-813.

Weikle, B. (December 14, 2017), “Household chores still a source of guilt for some women”. The Star https://www.thestar.com/life/relationships/opinion/2017/12/14/household-chores-still-a-source-of-guilt-for-some-women.html