Equality at home

In a 2011 BBC documentary J K Rowling said that she managed to write a book while raising a baby as a broke single mother because she “didn’t do housework for four years. Living in squalor, that was the answer.”
 
Women less unmoved by mess or with less magic on their minds might wish they could do the same — go AWOL on the Sisyphean, never-ending task of housework and devote that time to themselves. For even today, in most countries around the world, women end up doing more household chores than their male partners. The march for the equality of the sexes seems to fall apart at the family hearth.
 
A recent study by Gallup confirms this universal truth once more. It says that heterosexual couples in the US in the 18-34 age group are no more likely than older couples to share the burden of unpaid domestic labour equally. Though young men have become much more accepting of non-traditional gender roles, when it comes to household chores, couples veer towards gender stereotypes. So women continue to do more in the cooking, cleaning and childcare departments, while men work on the car or in the yard. On the whole, women spend more time doing housework than their partners, even if they are in demanding, full-time jobs.
 
The gender gap in housework and the gender gap in pay are two sides of the same coin. And together, they constitute a vicious cycle that keeps women down. A woman’s commitment to childcare and household is often held against her in the workplace. She is deemed to be short on time and not fully invested in the job, which gives the management a neat, subliminal excuse to pay her less than her male colleagues. In other words, inequality at home drives inequality at work. The result? The woman is kept in her place — overworked at home, underpaid at work, her ambitions thwarted, her dreams of self-realisation shattered long before she gets close to a so-called glass ceiling and has a shot at shattering it.

 
The situation is far worse in India. The country’s female labour force participation rate, which was a low 27 per cent at the time of the 2011 census, sank to 23.3 per cent in 2017-18. Lack of jobs is not the only reason for this. Most married women who cannot afford help have to single-handedly bear the burden of child rearing, housework and care for the elderly. There's simply no time to remain in paid employment.
 
Yes, some urban men who see themselves as sharing and caring partners may change nappies or cook a fancy dish on occasion. An advertisement for a high-end washing machine may put out the message that men ought to do the laundry too. But for the vast majority, and especially in the country’s rural and semi-urban areas, it is unthinkable that women will not slave away in the service of husband, children and family. Even when a woman manages to hold on to a job, you will likely find her cooking dinner and rolling a stack of rotis after a long day at work. Forget men — women, too, are socialised to stick to gender stereotypes at home.
 
The conversation around the division of labour in Indian households is so negligible, in fact, that there are no studies on the subject. A survey by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, an international body, found that in 2015 Indian women put in 5 hours and 31 minutes of household chores daily as opposed to Indian men who did less than an hour’s such work. Only Mexican women toiled more than Indian women, spending 6 hours and 23 minutes a day on these tasks, while the men pitched in with 2 hours and 17 minutes of housework. The gap was much closer in such socially progressive countries such as Denmark and Norway, but even there, women were doing more housework than men.
 
Today, many Japanese women are choosing not to marry because wives in that country are usually expected to do all the domestic grunt work. Not a bad move. It might be the only way to make men understand that if the institution of marriage is to survive, it must become an equitable partnership in every sense.
 

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Shuma Raha is a journalist and author