Association of Gender in Women and Men's Patterns of Unpaid Work

 

"So the industrious Bees do hourly strive

To bring their Loads of Honey to the Hive;

Their fordid Owners always reap the Gains,

Ans poorly recompense their Toil and Pains."

- 'The Women's Labour: To Mr. Stephen Duck' by Mary Collier

 

The association of gender with men’s and women’s pattern of unpaid work lies in its inequality. Gender is a recurring factor that affects the self and the social. Work, a usual phenomenon in our daily lives, is also an area that is constantly subjected to gender.

Work can be defined as any activity that involves physical or mental effort by an individual. It is an activity that costs time resources and has an agenda of personal or social benefit. Ideal work could be considered as the one that rewards with remuneration as prize, but the division of work into formal wage labour and unorganized informal work without pay does not always allow so. One of the most gendered facets of the formal and informal work market is care activities. Informal work is prevalent in both men and women, but when it comes to care activities, it is absolutely essential to look at the trend of how it impacts women disproportionately more than men.

The very basis of care work that distinguishes it from market labour work is the fact that it is unpaid. The ties of it with gender quite obviously reflects from societal gender role implications. Gender roles primarily decide the division of labour within a household, which essentially forms the majority of gendered unpaid labour.  We see this directly from the women around us- our mothers, grandmothers, wives, daughters, sisters- working for the household or domestic care, which with contrast to the surrounding men in the same household is significantly more laborious. It has been seen that across all regions of the world, women spend almost three to six hours on unpaid care activities on an average, while men spend between half to two hours. This too is subject to evaluation since there is a difference in the activities that women take up for the household and the ones that men take up. An article by OECD Development Centre in 2014 stated, “In India, for example, men devote 36 minutes to unpaid care responsibilities, out of which 36% goes into housework, with the remaining time spent on shopping, care for household members, and travel related to household activities. Out of six hours women devote to unpaid care activities, the portion of time specifically spent on housework reaches 85%”. It is evident how men are assigned with household activities that give them socialising, earning, and mobility rights, while women are restricted only to the private space with homely duties. The normalcy of this occurring stems from the existing gendered dichotomy of the public and the private, and from the fact that “unpaid care work is seen as a female responsibility.”

In many households, girls are taught care activities from a very young age, especially activities like cooking, cleaning, washing, etc. We often find in casual conversations how young girls capable of cooking or knitting are praised by family members and relatives considering these as “homely” activities. If observed, boys of the same age are barely taught the same. They are expected to focus on other activities like playing, studying, etc. and sometimes advancing a helping hand to their father, or parents. From a very young age, girls are taught to constantly shift between managing time with personal activities like studying and with care activities like household work. Women’s domain and men’s domain of care activities are dictated and decided without their own choices because of such gender norms societally and intergenerationally imposed. As they grow up, this gender gap between women and men’s contribution to household work acutes till the women reach the factor of the “double burden” in their daily life. The same women who had to manage time to balance their studies and occasional household work, now manage time to balance their work life in the formal labour market with their domestic work life as a wife, mother, daughter, etc. The article by OECD says, “On account of gendered social norms that view unpaid care work as a female prerogative, women across different regions, socio-economic classes and cultures spend an important part of their day on meeting the expectations of their domestic and reproductive roles.” This added pressure on their work life hampers them in personal spaces like investing time in other things, developing skills, interacting socially, or simply relaxing. Unpaid activities for women which primarily involve domestic work therefore have no substitution. These are seen as their primary roles while everything else they do are tertiary roles. The subject is quite flipped in the case of men. 

The burden of unpaid care activities for women also restricts them from involving themselves in educational or political spheres. While in maximum cases men are seen to have an uninterrupted linear career trajectory, with a balanced share of unpaid care activities as well as remunerative engagements, women are found to adjust and compromise from time to time to suit their career growth with their domestic roles. It is even seen among young girls who are forced to leave their education to help with domestic care in their own homes or at others’. These girls contributing to domestic help indirectly reward only their family, with negligible personal remuneration or benefit, hence submitting to unpaid work and consequential exploitation. Men on the other hand are never seen to drop out of schools and education to contribute to the already existing line of unpaid care activities. This is naturally considered to be the women’s area of concern, while men, right from this age, learn being the breadwinner of the family. This effect of the halt in girls’ education affects badly in the long run as they end up either not having any paid job or with vulnerable jobs subject to exploitation. A standard assumption for better female labour participation would be better education and employability. Gender inequality in the unpaid care activities that young girls and women conform to thus forms a link between gender gaps in labour force participation, the quality of employment, and wages earned by them.

Another factor that is noticeable is the disparity in the time dedicated by men and women in unpaid care work. It is seen that the household work done by women are of much greater quantity than that done by men, and quite obviously, the amount of time that is devoted to unpaid care work by the women has a negative correlation with female labour force participation. A study shows that in countries where women spent five hours on an average doing unpaid care activities, 50% of the women there belonging to the working age-population were active and employed or looking for jobs. In other countries however, where women spent three hours on an average doing unpaid care activities, almost 60% of the women there were actively engaged in the labour force. This clearly shows how every minute more spent by a woman in her unpaid daily activities results in one minute less of her time to dedicate herself to educational and vocational improvement, socio-political participation, and potential market-related activities.  

Gender inequality in unpaid work is also directly related to the economic condition of a country. It is observed that countries with high income have the most equal division of care responsibilities, since men there are more engaged in care activities. This factor keeps depleting with a lesser economy. Women in poverty-stricken homes face the worst consequences out of unpaid domestic work that even undermine their human rights. Many even spend seventeen to twenty hours only working for the household with no time to think for themselves. In most cases, men’s works from such backgrounds have a remunerative return, while for women, they are not only unrewarded but also made entirely invisible. Sylvia Chant used the terms “feminization of poverty” and “feminization of responsibility and obligation” which truly pictures the tenets of poor women being at the lowest step of the social ladder. She said that growing poverty among women is somehow linked with the “feminization” of household headship. It is obvious that such tendencies will pertain in a country which does not hold any statistical record of unpaid work in terms of quantity or quality. The role of women in unpaid work is not just in the spectrum of household activities but also within family enterprises which tends to be entirely wiped off. These unpaid activities are not affordable or realistic options for most women, yet every household’s well-being, hence a nation’s well-being, blindly depends on them. There is no contribution however in the GDP count for all these activities. This work and its workers are relegated to gratitude rendered almost entirely invisible. The article by OECD Development Centre says, “In countries where women spend twice as much time as men in caring activities, they earn only 65% of what their male counterparts earn for the same job. This drops to 40% when women are spending five times the amount of time on unpaid care work (for full-time employees).” The pressure of “double burden” and eventually “occupational downgrading” comes up again and again in their lifetime which when observed carefully is almost never a factor of worry in men’s professional or personal lives.

It has been seen time and again through various studies how countries with family-friendly policies promoting a good balance between market and family work for the two genders have higher female economic activity. In order to achieve this, providing better environments will not bring sufficient change, but the exclusion of women in the spectrum of unpaid work needs to be first addressed. Their contribution to unpaid work regularly in the private as well as public domains needs to be made visible. It is not just the labour of these women that is systematically ignored, but the women themselves. Their contributions in unpaid activities within the domestic sphere, in family enterprises, or even in paid working environments, hardly help them in their state of vulnerability. What the aim is to not just find recognition for their labour, but for their voice too. Inequality in unpaid work trends result in women succumbing to poor quality of work which in turn subject them to exploitation, vulnerability, weaker positions. The existing situation of work in and outside sphere of unpaid work activities makes women and children a pool of cheap labour services with no return whatsoever. 

It is only through the legislative policies that a turn of events can eventually come. Domestic or reproductive housework that most adult women are engaged with do not have any legislative recognition, since these unpaid works are not based on recorded economic backgrounds. As a result, they enjoy no social security policies for such work, added to the fact that there is also no remunerative return. Such gender biased national policies need to be improved to meet international standards which can be done only through acceptance of women’s contributions on a larger scale and including them in policy making. Families play a large role in empowering women. Without collective family support, it is very difficult for women to act for a change from root levels. The aim is not just to find a voice in the sea of men on the national grounds, but also in their most intimate spaces, in homes.