By Louisa Devadson

According to a 2016 report released by UNICEF, girls between five and 14 years old spend 40% more time on unpaid household chores, compared to boys their age.

‘The overburden of unpaid household work begins in early childhood and intensifies as girls reach adolescence’, shared UNICEF's Principal Advisor on Gender and Development, Anju Malhotra. ‘As a result, girls sacrifice important opportunities to learn, grow, and just enjoy their childhood. This unequal distribution of labour among children also perpetuates gender stereotypes and the double-burden on women and girls across generations.’

The report also outlines that the work of girls is less visible and persistently undervalued. Time spent doing ‘invisible work’, such as caring for younger siblings, are often imposed on girls and expectations like these limit a girl's time for leisure, socialisation, education or for merely having a childhood.

As these disparities grow with age (accelerated by motherhood), these increasing domestic responsibilities are a significant factor for why women are paid less than men. It poses a substantial obstacle in their careers, according to researchers. Achieving equality, they argue, will require not just preparing girls for paid work, but also teaching boys to do unpaid work.

‘A world of happier men and happier women who are truer to themselves. And this is how to start: We must raise our daughters differently. We must also raise our sons differently.’

 ― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists

‘Being involved with the household from a young age is how most children learn these skills’, said Sandra Hofferth, a sociologist at the University of Maryland who co-authored a recent analysis. ‘Progressives believed that they were training their boys for greater involvement in the home. However, we do not see any evidence that the gap in household work has declined.’

This is an ongoing project in my home. My partner and I work at being equal partners, and we have gotten pretty good at it. We have successfully divvied up chores, and I feel the responsibilities are shared. I have more time to do other things and think about other things. However, our socio-cultural background means that I have been preparing to be a domestic whiz kid my whole life. Everything he tries to do, I can do faster and more efficiently, which means in busy times, I just go into autopilot and sort it all out.

Our conversations about this issue led us to one realisation – despite our best intentions to be equal partners, we had no role models. It's an observation I've also made of other domestic partnerships and households, back home in Malaysia, during this pandemic and the implemented Restricted Movement Order. Men are now often the ones who are heading to supermarkets and completing errands after the government announced that only the 'head of the household' can go to the supermarket during the lockdown. Supermarkets are creating pictographs to guide lost and confused men through unfamiliar terrain. Memes blew up humouring this experience. Women have shared the many funny and exasperating adventures of guiding the male members of their households through every day tasks.

Women's time has been fragmented and disrupted throughout history. Their daily movements have been informed by the demands of housework, familial duty, and kin work, maintaining strong bonds among family and community. Women, even those raised in progressive or economically developed societies, lack the luxury of prolonged stretches of uninterrupted, focused time. Time to create, time to think, time to indulge in their passions and visions.

‘Pure leisure, making time just for oneself, is nothing short of a courageous act of radical and subversive resistance’, asserted Brigid Schulte, author of Overwhelmed: How to Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time. ‘Easier to do, one researcher joked, if, like the writer, composer, philosopher and mystic Hildegard of Bingen, you became a nun.’

Women's work – invisible or otherwise – needs to be given the value it deserves. Some countries utilise time diary data to track time spent on child care and domestic labour to calculate their GDP. This work is essential to society and economies. Developing these domestic life skills in every child for them to grow into independent people is vital. To evolve into an equitable society where women and men can have time for meaningful work, family and community, and for true leisure – to be fully human.