Why a woman's work is never done: The problem with unpaid labour

• Adult children living at home should pay board
• What your cleaner wants you to know
• Why some people have an obsession to clean

How much housework did you do this morning? If you’re a woman, and you live with a man, then you likely did a whole heap more than him. According to the 2016 census, women do between 14 and five hours of unpaid domestic work every week, whereas men do less than five.

Here’s another sobering statistic: even when men stay at home to mind kids, women are still doing the lion’s share of housework. According to the Australian Institute of families, “Stay-at-home-father families tend not have a lot in common with stay-at-home-mother families. Children tend to be older, and mothers still take on much of the caring and household work, even if fathers have increased responsibility for child care.”

What’s going on? According to a cartoon called “You Should Have Asked” that went viral last month, too many men view their partners as the manager of household chores, and themselves as the underling.

This leaves the woman responsible for the “mental load”, that is the stress and worry that comes with running a household. The woman – who is almost always a mother as well, (we’ll get to this in a minute) – has to figure out when to buy groceries, book doctor’s appointments, get the dishwasher fixed, when the parent teacher night is, and how it all fits in so as to keep the wheels turning.

Men, generally speaking, don’t know when it’s time to change the sheets, and they don’t get the impact of changing them too soon, and how this will set into action a series of unmanageable events that ends with a naked five-year-old screaming for dinner. Mothers have to plan, plan, plan to avoid disaster, and men, are not let in on the plan.

Feminists have theorised that women take on more housework because they’re raised to look after dolls, and do dishes. But this does not account for the number of perfectly capable men who manage to keep houses clean before they have a baby with a woman.

“Before my husband and I became parents, we rarely fought. Then we had a baby – and started fighting all the time,” is how writer Jancee Nunn describes the tectonic shift in her book, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids.

“The smallest issues set me off. Granted, I was deranged from rampaging hormones, sleep deprivation, and the quadrupling of at-home work that fell largely to me, even though I married an evolved guy. My husband Tom seemed almost bizarrely oblivious that I needed help.”

For those who are not yet parents, I have news: child-rearing is petrol to the fire that is unpaid housework.

And when you consider that even before a baby is conceived, women are mapping out which vitamins to take, which obstetrician can give them the best care, and when to take maternity leave, that mental load is in operation before either parent even notices it. By the time the baby is born, the die is cast, and breast-feeding almost guarantees that fathers take a backseat.

But what accounts for the obliviousness? A current theory I have nutted out with the father of my own two children, is that, because I carry so much of the mental load, it’s easier if I just do the next chore myself. I can see the long game. Besides, I’m too tired to explain – as are most women – and it takes too long to demonstrate.

But the deeper reason might be that little girls are encouraged to stay neat and clean, while boys are allowed to be messier, and dirtier. So, when he says he “doesn’t see” the mess, what he really might be saying is “I see it, but it’s not tied to my sense of worth the way it is with you.”

Or, as my husband put it, “It’s like we are both studying for the test, but you’re the only one being graded on it.” This is possibly the core of the uneven split: women are judged more harshly on parenting and clean homes, because we live in a society that tethers femininity to the domestic sphere. If we see a man feeding his kids McDonald’s in a messy house we might say “bless” at his efforts. If we see a woman, we might call Child Protection Services. 

The good news is, it’s getting better. Men are doing more housework than they were a decade ago, and they’re spending more time with kids. Anne-Marie Slaughter, author of Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family, believes women have to let go of chores being done perfectly, and everyone needs to communicate more. “You literally sit down and say, ‘How are we going to divide this up? What are you going to take? And what am I going to take?'”

Although, if your household is anything like mine, finding time to even talk about such things is half the struggle.