Women do more housework than men. Yeah, and the sky’s blue, right?
While Australia is a diverse nation of many and varied relationship types, the data tells us this: most relationships see an unfair distribution of domestic duties between men and women.
And it has a very real effect on our careers.
Women spend around 4.5 unpaid hours every week looking after domestic chores, while men contribute less than half of that. The fallout? Women are tired.
No matter how hard we run to keep up with men’s weekly work schedule, we simply cannot match it. Staying behind for overtime just doesn’t work when dinner needs to be cooked, uniforms ironed, dogs fed, bins emptied, and the kitchen cleaned.
And so the debate continues: should women work shorter weeks to take into consideration their unpaid work at home, or should men just start to pick up the slack?
Men are able to work longer hours, quite simply, because they do not feel the same burden of unpaid domestic chores.
According to an article from Broadly, men work on average 41 hours a week; women average 36 hours.
The article references a recent study from ANU proving that women are sacrificing their mental and physical health in order to try and juggle longer working hours, and their domestic chores.
"Men work these hours because they're able to," says ANU researcher Professor Lyndall Strazdins, "thanks to having less responsibilities on the domestic front. They therefore have a 'significant' head start in their career, in the form of an extra 100 hours per year."
Top Comments
Also, outsourcing of the household labour. Treating cleaners, sitters and services as just another household expense, rather than a luxury that is weighed up against the woman's income as if she has to justify why she doesn't do it for free. Cleaners, for example, are not as expensive as many other things like cable tv and takeaway, that many households wouldn't live without. Women need to just stop doing it and force their partners to collaborate on the solution, or else stop complaining how tired they are. There should be no sympathy for women who continue to be martyrs. The Family Law Act of 1975 legalised divorce after all...