Property News · January 8, 2016

Do you do the ironing or do you take out the bins? It may be time to gender-swap your chores


Even the most forward-thinking families can find themselves contributing to a gendered division of labour. The 2016 #ChoreChallenge aims to highlight how many women are working a ‘second shift’A fortnight ago, I received the following tweet: “Husband casually mentioned today he has never cleaned our bathroom – it’s always me! How did I miss that for 31 years?!”Apart from chortling at one response (“you were too busy cleaning the bathroom!”), the thing that struck me about the tweet was just how much it resonated with my own experiences and those I had heard from other women. Even among feminist friends and forward-thinking families, it’s fascinating to see how our insistence on gender equality in every other area of life sometimes falters before the stubborn persistence of gendered chores. This goes both for the type of tasks (who does the laundry and washes up? Who takes out the bins?) and the quantity of time spent doing them. A recent BBC survey found that women spend twice as much time on chores as men, devoting well over the equivalent of one working day per week to household duties. And a Mumsnet survey of 1,000 working mothers found that only 5% of men took responsibility for giving the house a weekly clean, compared with 71% of women. The stark division in unpaid labour also encompasses childcare – from who looks after children at weekends to who is expected to take time off when children are sick – and persists even in surveys of heterosexual couples where the male partner doesn’t have a job. Among same-sex couples, some studies have suggested that there is likely to be a fairer division of chores, while others seem to suggest there is still a somewhat “gendered” division of labour, with the lower-earning partner tending to take on chores traditionally considered “women’s work”, such as cooking. Continue reading…

Source : theguardian.com
Read more…Do you do the ironing or do you take out the bins? It may be time to gender-swap your chores

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