Value of housework

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 856.

Role overload

Rachel has role overload.That is, she has difficulty combining the roles of worker and of wife and mother. Role overload is one of the disadvantages that today's women face. While both parents are more ‘stretched' when the woman of the household works, it is usually the woman who does most of the childcare and housework. Most studies investigating housework conclude that women (whether employed or not) do ‘the lions share' of housework and childcare. An Australian study, for example, found that employed wives did 69.3 hours of unpaid work around the house during a two-week period while employed husbands did approximately 31.2 hours. A study by Bird (1999) shows a sim­ilar picture for U.S. households. In this study of 1,256 adults, Bird showed that while working women certainly want an equal share of housework, they ‘shoulder the main burden' by doing approximately twice as much as their spouses. Her study showed that after marriage, women gain 14 hours of household chores per week, while their husbands gain only 90 minutes.

There have been some attempts in the United States, Europe, and Australia over the past few decades to encourage governments to pay people for the housework they do. A U.S. organization called the Wages for Housework Campaign argued for many years that housework was boring and degrading because it was unpaid, and that payment would improve the status of women in society overall. More recently they have argued for housewives to be included in the labor force and for unpaid housework to be included in calculations of a nation s wealth, for example, the gross national product (GNP). They have argued that this would make housework more visible, and could possibly lead to greater invest­ment in programs to help women.

So far, no government has seriously considered paying people for housework. This is not surprising when you consider how difficult it would be to implement such a scheme. The first problem would be to determine how much people would be paid. In 1995 the United Nations estimated the annual value of women's unpaid work at $11 trillion worldwide. An Australian government study in 1991 calculated that if someone was to be paid to do all the housework in one home it would be worth 400 Australian dollars a week (equivalent to about 250 U.S. dollars at that time). However, there would be more problems to ‘iron out.' Would everyone get the same amount? Which tasks would and would not be paid for? How would the government know if the work was done?