I have become aware recently, partly through one YouTube video in particular (I think this one) , and partly through passive social media, and some bell hooks interviews/conversations, that there is a very large divide between household labour of a man and a woman. This refers specifically to heterosexual monogamous couples, I have no idea if or how it extends in other directions. In general, the women do more household labour (as measured in time spent per week) than men do. This is worse the more children there are. This is still the case if the woman is the primary breadwinner. That is an absolute mindfuck, to me at least. If we take a rose-glassed view of the past and imagine a father whose single income is enough to support his wife and three children (and possibly another wife and three children in a different town), the argument makes sense that he performs labour external to the household to generate money, and the wife performs labour internal to the household to keep things running at home. Presumably, the level of labour is similar, in terms of time spent. I have no idea if it was. Possibly with terrible work conditions it could have been reversed. All things being equal, we'd expect that the amount of time spent 'working' for the household is equal. That's the desired goal, of an equitable relationship.
There are a few caveats. Firstly, I like cooking, and I like baking. If I never got to cook or bake I would be unhappy, or less happy than I might otherwise be if never got to do them. I consider myself to be a hobbyist baker, not really a hobbyist cook but still I definitely don't dislike cooking. It would be strange to me if I never got to do those tasks in a relationship. Cooking and baking can be seen as labour in a household. I am better suited to those tasks, because I enjoy them, and competency and efficiency often follows enjoyment. Especially if my partner were to dislike or not enjoy those tasks. Is it still fair to call the time that I spend on those tasks labour? It clearly should not be because they are things that I enjoy. But much in the same way that I can enjoy cake, but would not want to eat cake as my only sustenance, I may not enjoy doing them continually and continuously. Further, when a hobby becomes a task, the joy is sometimes lost. There have been many times in my life where I did not wish to cook. Or, where I did not wish to think of what meal to cook. Or, to cook what I wanted I had to go to the supermarket. Or, to go to the supermarket I also had to plan out the next few meals. More on this in a later paragraph. This confusion over whether an enjoyable chore is labour can be a sneaky way of imbalancing the labour done in a relationship. I don't actually have an impression or view on how to resolve this, that'll be a requirement for future gardening. The idea arises quite quickly if you slap down silly ideas about gender as your foundations for thought: women naturally like cooking, so you should naturally like cooking, because you like cooking it's not really labour, you actually get to enjoy your time and have fun, unlike me, I work in a coal mine, it's much harder
work, but that's because I'm a man and that's what I'm supposed to do. It's the man's job to hunt down prey and risk my life. I WOULD DIE IN A WAR so you can cook, clean, wash, hoover, shop, manage my social calendar, my wardrobe, my children and a fake orgasm once a week. I saw a comment on Instagram (a platform which I am trying to use less, perhaps thoughts on social media will be worth writing about, but I don't think I have anything new to add. Side note - it would be good to add a way of viewing footnotes somehow because this is really quite a long thing to put in brackets and there's absolutely no reason for me to do so) which requires a little bit of context. It was a joke video about how the husband couldn't see the ketchup in the fridge because it was stationary, but could detect some pixels moving in his video game. The comment said that this trait: the ability of women to differentiate colour (presumably the very tricky task of discerning red from white) and of men to detect movement came from when people were hunter-gatherers. Women gathered and so needed to be able to tell colours apart (to detect fruit on a bush, ignoring the fact that gathering includes leaves, mushrooms, and roots, the latter of which is the very hard to see colour of under the ground) while men hunted so needed to be able to detect movement from far away. This idea seems, to me at least, like a very silly thought to say as gospel. It could be true, men are more likely to have colour blindness than women, and very rarely some women have four colour cones rather than three. So the average women sees more colour than the average man (I should discuss this more with some more general thoughts on gender in a separate plot [I need to work on the language that I use to refer to things in my garden]). There was a paper (which I decided not to link to: past me scores again!), from a very brief internet search, which suggested that women could match colours by shade quicker and more accurately than men. I would expect that this difference, colourblindness aside (the paper used 30 men and 30 women, so 2-3 of the men would be expected to be colourblind in some manner, using internet numbers, and it could be higher or lower because of randomness) if it still exists is caused by socialisation. Although the paper was published in an Indian journal, and I know little about Indian cultural practices, I would believe that women typically use more beauty products, and spend more time worrying about their dress (and thus the colour of their outfits) than men. Both are activities that might require one to be more capable of differentiating colours. The point of this example is to show that there is very commonly a reference to genetics and past history as an explanation for behaviour today, even though there's a whole host of reasons why that might not matter (The Hidden Half by Michael Blastland is a good book about how impactful randomness is). This idea extends to that of protection. Men are on average physically stronger than women and faster than women at short distances. These differences do make men typically better at physical fighting than women (at least as far as I know. If the fight involved an 80km chase sequence maybe women would be better. If the fight involved being in a small tight cramped space women might be better. If the fight involved discerning colour of objects which are possibly camouflaged women might be better). This is used to explain why men go off to war and fight. The possibility of maybe having to fight and die in a war can be used to excuse a huge amount of labour. I, a man, have a very serious and dangerous possible responsibility that I use to excuse myself from less dangerous, less serious, Sissiphyian responsibilities that I leave for a woman to do. It is rather laughable when put in this form. I do not mean to discredit the coal miner (or other perilous professions), that is a dangerous and very real task that still continues today. There is a conversation to be had about the risks of a job, along with the associated stress, and how that is balanced (perhaps this is a seed of a further idea). But it is absurd to use a hypothetical to escape reality.
The cost of domestic is often simplified and made light of. One of my core formative memories was watching a Ted(x) talk of Hans Rosling discussing the impact of the washing machine. For him, it was a personal tale: his grandma had sat and watched the whole washing machine's cycle when their family first bought one. Here was a device which saved hours and hours of domestic labour. It would allow them time for the mother to take her children off to a library, to spend time learning to read or to teach them to read. It began an upwards spiral of economic betterment which would result in better education, better healthcare, and a better quality of life. He tells the story better than I. The humble washing machine has all this impact by replacing a humble chore: "washing". One take away is of the power of small (or large) changes in people's lives, especially those living in some form of poverty (this is the interpretation I believe Rosling went in). Another, is that the true cost of domestic labour is not understood. In this case the time required is larger than expected or estimated. This is compounded by the fact that a single task has required subtasks. One example of this is emptying the bin. Suppose that partner A says to partner B that they will help empty the bin. It is not enough to just empty the bin (here a house bin into an outside bin), you also need to replace the bin liner, which requires monitoring and managing the supply of bin liners. You need to know the schedule of the outside bins (which partner is managing this? Maybe A doesn't think of it and B assumes that A will do it). Is doing the bins just one bin or does it include every bin in the house, and then every outside bin's schedule. A lot of tasks are similar. The dependencies of cooking, which involve interweaving shopping, inventory management, time planning, creativity etc. Tasks that involve managing children contain those components as well as the emotional toll of having to be the 'bad' parent. My parents had a good cop bad cop routine, where generally my mum would be the parent who told us to brush our teeth, put the toys away, and do the homework. My dad was the fun parent, who let us play on the Xbox before school, or let us throw spaghetti to test if it was cooked by how well it stuck to the ceiling. This endeared me as a child slightly more to him, and less to my mother. I don't know for certain but I expect in a lot of relationships the father is the stern parental figure who enforces discipline. For either parent, that is a cost which is generally required to raise children.
Further there is a belief, or at least my impression is, that this sort of labour is low skilled, easy and as a result, low value. In general, the barrier to entry is low. It does not require years of schooling or a degree to pick clothes off the floor or to dust down a surface. But there is skill in the labour. I recall recently watching a YouTube video, which was a reupload of a wife swap TV programme (possibly the one, I don't know very much about TV programmes in general and I have no hope of finding the video), where quite predictably, two wives were swapped. As far as I can tell these sorts of programmes only work if both partners are stay at home. One of the families was richer (I think the husband owned a small construction company) and one was poorer (I can't remember what he did). Both had children. The wealthier couple had a larger house, and a lot more pets. The wealthier wife did all the household labour herself, her husband didn't help at all. He spent his spare time either looking after his health and appearance or playing golf. The poorer wife shared more of the household labour with her husband. When they were swapped (I didn't watch the whole episode just some bits of it) the poorer wife struggled to complete all the tasks in a day. Not just because there was more to do, but the nature of the tasks too (picking up lots of shit, being distracted by a parrot, etc.). The wealthier wife managed to complete the days work by noon. There was a very clear difference in skill between the two of them. Similarly, I have often looked at the amount of labour my mother does or has done, and have been amazed at how it all gets done. The barrier to entry for household labour is low (which is used as a reason to devalue it and its worth, while simultaneously lots of partners can't help with domestic labour because they 'can't get it right', which is very close to the idea of weaponised incompetence [1]), but the skill, effort, practice, and energy required to do all the household labour to a high standard is much higher than is generally recognised.
A further consideration is the opportunity cost of this sort of labour. The unpaid intern that slaves away has dreams of one day 'employing' a fleet of unpaid interns themselves; there is no upward mobility with housework. It may get easier, by virtue of practice, but the burden will not decrease in size. It may increase with children, or the reduction in labour of a partner, or increase in difficulty due to age or injury. There is a limited amount of energy that any person has in a day. By performing a greater quantity of household labour a person has less energy to work in employment, if they even have the time at all. If they also work (which, as the price of modern life has gone up, often both parents or partners have to work to earn enough to survive in society [2]) then they are sacrificing the possibility of overtime or a higher standard of work that would be achievable with better rest. One of the explanations for the gender pay gap, where older men are paid more than women of the same age, is that women choose to take breaks for maternity leave. This choice is often not one, with their husbands forcing a decision. If a woman takes a career break it is only natural that she has lost all knowledge and skill required for her previous job and should start again from a lower level. Or, since a woman inevitably will choose to take a career break and thus be out of work, it is better to promote a man to a more senior role over a woman, as the work is so important, or the training for the roll so great, that it would be a waste if anyone were to take a break. This ignores the fact that the person who has been promoted could just leave. These thought patterns should result in those who are least likely to leave the workforce due to parentage being promoted. That isn't the case as those people are post menopausal women (I first saw this comment in the Economist magazine). It is possible that a man of any age could have a child and decide to take paternity leave. A solution to this problem is to make paid parental leave compulsory for both genders (which is not a fool proof solution but it would go some way). Regardless, the possibility that a woman, at some far off future time, might have to do increased domestic labour, at a possible cost to her employment, is sufficient to justify, in some people's minds, promoting them less is absurd. There is a lot to be said on the puritanical productivity culture which exists in the world, but, for a lot of people some form of work can be enjoyable and valuable. It gets people out of the house, socialising, and learning skills. There are beneficial components to it. Giving up those benefits, in place of domestic labour, is not a decision that should be assumed to automatically happen.
Second, because the work and skill set is so widespread, it is not lacking in value (in the sense that there is a large supply of people who could do the work) instead it has more value: since it is so required. This feels as though it is connected to the current use of AI. Broadly, in my view, a lot of what AI does is soulless crap. It is surprising that lots of people get excited about the soulless crap it produces. To verify that it is correct you need a person. In that case, it may just be quicker to have the person do the task anyway. As the AI cannot take responsibility for the decisions it makes, a person is needed. If AI is revolutionising work, then probably the work that is being revolutionised is useless valueless crap. Perhaps this opinion is uninformed and wrong. Maybe I'll get clubbed to death by a McKinsey's consultant tomorrow but it's a risk I'll take. I would prefer it if AI could remove housework, and leave art or writing or any other creative pursuit alone.
1. While writing this I had some thoughts on weaponised incompetence which detract from the post. I haven't engaged that much with any discussion about this so my views are naive. I think that often it is unintentional. There may well be a genuine desire to help and to do labour for a household. The trouble is that partly, the person doing it may be very bad at doing it, as they have not done very much of it at all. In order to overcome this the person has to be bad. Both the person taking up the work has to accept that their work is bad and that they will work to improve the quality of their work. It is not easy doing something for someone and being constantly criticised. Equally, the person who did the work originally has to accept that it will be done worse than if they did it, with the knowledge that eventually it will reach the same standard (one hopes, if it never does that is a problem). Both parts of the process are tricky to handle and deal with, especially if already stressed and overworked. Another part of the problem is that often, if people are like me and others I know, there will be a system for doing something. It might be that every time the bin is emptied a new binbag is put in the bin. It might be every time the dishwasher is unloaded, each object has its specific place that it is placed, rather than being flung in any old cupboard or added to any old utensil pot. If a person comes along to do the work that is covered by the system, without understanding the system, and how their action interacts with the system. They will most likely end up generating more work for the person in the first place. Suppose that a new bin liner isn't put in the bin and then the next person to use it throws a chicken packet or fish packet in the bin. Now the entire bin has to be cleaned and sanitised, while in the middle of cooking food. If the dishwasher is unloaded randomly, it can take time searching for objects that overall takes longer than if the dishwasher had never been unloaded. The onus here is on the person interacting with the system to communicate their intention, understand how the work already occurs, and integrate as seamlessly as possible with it. This requirement, puts the person who is already doing lots of work in the position of teaching someone how to do it, which is not easy, and probably requires more work in the short term. I suspect this might be why weaponised incompetence exists even with well-intentioned people. The short term costs for correcting it are too expensive. There is an activation energy which needs to be invested first, before the energy savings are returned. This is of course not the case for people who consciously weaponise incompetence as an excuse to escape from labour. You may well argue that accidentally weaponised incompetence is an empty category (descriptor?) which is fair enough. ↩