Think a lot about housework? That's the problem - Women's Agenda

Think a lot about housework? That’s the problem

How do you earn a full time wage while managing the bulk of the domestic work at home?

How do you continually strive to earn more and take on more responsibilities when you’re also juggling a full time role at home?

Some women can. Most, however, succumb to the simple limitations of time.

Many others manage to complete their various responsibilities, but find the mental energy required utterly exhausting.

Indeed, the overwhelm clearly has something to do with the fact the female pipeline of talent gets narrower the higher up the leadership chain you go.

And all around the world the disproportionate distribution of housework is holding women back, according to a report from UN Women released today, Progress of the World’s Women: Transforming Economies.

Amazingly, just 8% of women working in developed countries with children under six have any kind of domestic help or childcare outside of a family member.

It’s a figure that puts our current childcare challenges in perspective. And one that shows for many women, an ability to simply continue with work comes down to sheer luck — that is, the luck that you’ll have a family member around to help.

It’s also a figure — up there with the Report’s finding that women around the world do almost 2.5 times the amount of unpaid work as men — that shows just how much work the G20 has to do if it hopes to get anywhere close to reducing the workforce participation gap between men and women by 25% in the next ten years.

How can we expect women to enter the workforce while they’re still contributing as much as they do at home? How can we expect women to simply rely on the luck of having childcare available in order to earn a wage elsewhere?

We can’t, not unless we find real and sustainable solutions to help.

So what can we do? UN Women suggests a targeted approach including more wide-reaching paid parental leave, more accessible and affordable childcare options, and targets and quotas for leadership — particularly for male-dominated areas. As executive director Julie McKay writes today for Women’s Agenda, there’s no one approach that will solve this problem. Rather, a wide-reaching but measured shift in the structural and cultural barriers that are ultimately holding women back.

But all of it must be underpinned by a cultural shift regarding who’s doing what in the home. Unfortunately that also happens to be the one thing that, Australia wide, is probably the most difficult to systematically achieve.

Addressing the housework imbalance is not about men simply doing a little more, it’s about women no longer being perceived as the ‘primary household manager’: the one who does the majority of the work, while also managing the strategic direction.

A senior executive once described her household responsibilities to me as not being exhausting because of the hours she had to put it, but rather because of the thinking involved. It’s not just buying the groceries, but deciding which groceries to buy. It’s not just cooking dinner, but determining a nutritious and affordable meal plan for the week. It’s not merely enough to take the kids to various extra-curricular activities during the week, but also to direct, encourage and strategise just which activities they should pursue.

It’s exhausting. Physically and mentally. And it needs to be shared.

Read Julie McKay’s piece on what more Australia can be doing to reach our female workforce participation commitments here. 

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