Lighten Women’s Unpaid Workload

A new UN report estimates women do 2.6 times the amount of unpaid care and domestic work that men do, writes Julia Carpenter. “Childcare, cooking and cleaning, even things like picking kids up from school or taking elderly parents to the doctor.”

While this is probably not unexpected, it still surprises me. Why are there hardly any couples that share these tasks equally? Why do most people find this normal?

The "second shift" of unpaid work at home also means that women have less time to grow their careers and have less time for leisure activities, like exercising and playing games.

Brigid Schulte, director of the Better Life Lab at New America: "When you expect women to do all that unpaid work, they don't have the energy or the bandwidth to do that deep, concentrated work in the way that men do. So that's robbing women of the ability to be innovators."

The article continues to mention ways to lighten the unpaid workload women disproportionately bear. “First, companies and countries can institute family leave or flexible policies that help shift the cultural norms that keep men in the office and women in the home.”

Here in the Netherlands many mothers don’t do paid work because childcare is so expensive. And in many cases, (for some reason) men work fulltime and women part-time. Of course, this means women do more of the care and domestic work.

“Second, families can discuss how this affects them on an individual level.”

I can recommend the system my partner and I use to everyone. We’ve divided the days of the week that we care for our daughter equally since her birth. One week he does the shopping and cooking, and I clean up and wash, and the next week it’s the other way around.

This may sound rigid and inflexible to some (it’s not, we can always swap days), but I’m sure it would save many couples a lot of fighting. I believe that better relationships and more equality means happier women AND men (and children) AND more female presidents, CEOs and inventors.