I like hugs and I like kisses, But what I really love is help with the dishes! This would be a downtrodden woman's view of today's world, wouldn't it? Where two partners are working full-time, should the housework be shared?
Where the woman is at home, should there be a different pattern to partnership? Who does the shopping? Who fixes the electrics, who buys the bulbs? Who is in charge of driving the children, here, there and everywhere? Who attends the school meetings? Who puts out the grey bin, the green bin? And, more importantly, who brings them back in? New insights into these questions were unveiled in a new study recently published. They raise the issue as to whether the new freedoms we enjoy, courtesy of the sisters in the Women's Liberation Movement, have enhanced or encumbered womens' lives today.
A new academic study of sharing of burdens in the home shows that a single woman will spend on average 10 hours a week on housework and a single man, seven. As soon as they become a couple, however, her household workload goes up on average to 15 hours a week, while his goes down to five.
The study, for the Economic Journal by French academic Hélène Couprie, is based on figures from the British Household Panel Survey, and hence describes Homo Britanicus. Other research (IRISS study, 2006) finds Homo Hibernicus to be considerably less sharing: Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Malta and Greece share the dubious distinction of having the least egalitarian households in Europe with women doing about 20 hours a week more housework than their partners. (Britain is close to the European average, while the star performers are Bulgaria, Romania, the Baltics and the Nordics.)
The Couprie research also found a clear link between women's consent to "specialise" in housework and the lower wages they get at work - women accumulated fewer tradeable skills and became less economically productive. And lower wages at work mean a lower status in the home, reinforcing the pressure on women on housework. The result, she argues, is a vicious circle of disadvantage that persists in spite of apparent advances socially in education, and employment laws that are supposed to outlaw discrimination at work.
In 2005 Spain's socialist government passed a law that obliges men who marry in civil ceremonies to pledge to "share domestic responsibilities and the care and attention" of children and elderly family members. Unlikely perhaps to change attitudes overnight, but a little more stick and less carrot is not such a bad idea.