Women carry more guilt from messy home
Sarah Carmichael is a single mother of two kids — both who have chronic medical conditions — and she works full-time as an operations manager for a small business. But even though she earns enough money that she could afford to outsource house cleaning, guilt holds her back from doing so.
“I feel like I should be able to do everything myself,” says the Ajax mom. “Maybe I have something to prove to myself, or maybe I have something to prove to others — probably both.” Describing herself as “fiercely independent,” she adds she would, “feel like I’ve failed if I got help.”
Carmichael admits that, despite it being nearly 2018, her feelings about housekeeping are shaped by her gender. “I definitely feel like women are ‘supposed’ to keep a clean house that needs to be presentable at all times. I feel like the condition of my house is a measure of my value in other people’s eyes.”
Carmichael isn’t alone in the pressure she puts on herself to keep up with domestic tasks despite having kids and a busy career. I became curious about the mixed feelings women report on this issue when I posted a recommendation on Facebook recently for a cleaning service I had just started using.
This simple little review elicited a surprising amount of response — interestingly, all of it from women. Some of that feedback indicated that, in addition to doing a declining but still disproportionate amount of household chores (3.6 hours daily on unpaid household tasks compared to 2.4 hours for men, according to Statistics Canada’s most recent Time Use Survey), women still take on an extra helping of guilt when they can’t keep up.
Melissa Milkie, a professor of sociology at the University of Toronto Mississauga whose work centres around gender and family, says that’s because our culture still has “strong and ‘stuck’ norms of femininity and masculinity,” despite the fact women are more likely than ever to work outside the home.
“Employed women continue to be held to high, sometimes impossible standards of a warm, welcoming, organized, clean and beautiful home,” Milkie says.
Sure, plenty of women I know, mostly middle-class professional moms, say they’ve happily embraced using a cleaning service and easily see the logic in outsourcing lower-paying tasks so they can devote more time to higher-paying tasks or free up hours to spend with their families. So do their male partners, who also don’t want to spend the entire weekend cleaning. But many women still trip over deeply ingrained messages that it’s indulgent to get someone else to do some of your dirty work. My friend’s wife is a partner in a law firm and even she can’t bring herself to hire a cleaner, despite urgings from her husband — who does a lot around the house when he’s home but whose work in the military means he’s frequently away — to greenlight domestic help.
A word about privilege here: Yes, guilt over housework is indeed a Cadillac problem. If you can even contemplate a cleaning service, you’re more fortunate than most people in the world. (And to make sure your outsourcing doesn’t contribute to hardship for others, you may want to use a sole proprietor whom you can pay directly or a reputable service that’s known to treat its employees well.)
That said, a study from the University of British Columbia and Harvard Business School in July made a case that even people of quite modest means would benefit from diverting a small amount of their budget to outsource tasks that liberate their time and reduce the number of mundane tasks on their plates.
Published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, it found that when study subjects spent even $40 getting disliked tasks off their plates, it contributed more to the happiness of study subjects than spending that same money buying material goods.
The reason? Since the pace of modern life has created an increasing sense of time scarcity, “using money to buy time can provide a buffer against this time famine, thereby promoting happiness,” the authors found.
So why are legions of women still hesitant to commit dollars where they are proven to truly buy happiness? Some of this is because we’re holding ourselves to standards upheld by our mothers and grandmothers.
“I’ve been seriously considering hiring a cleaner to come in once every other week to tackle my floors and do the dusting,” says Ashley MacInnis of Halifax, whose son is 7. “Growing up, my mom kept the house spotless and I’ve always felt inadequate that my place isn’t as well-kept as hers, despite the fact she was mostly a stay-at-home mom and I work full-time and freelance on the side.”
By contrast, her brother grew up in the same environment yet seems “completely unfazed by a mess.”
“I think I was the same way before I became a mother and felt this unfathomable pressure to do everything perfectly, by myself, and make it look easy,” MacInnis says.
The state of the home is still considered an important demonstration of being a “good” wife, partner or mother, Milkie says, despite the fact that most women work. “Even if women are critical of these societal expectations, they may feel judged by others because they believe others buy into these unrealistic home standards as part of a woman’s role.”
Case in point: One woman I talked to concealed the fact that she has a housecleaner from her mother for five years out of fear her mother would be disappointed. She wasn’t.
Kirsten Duke, a policy analyst for the Treasury Board in Ottawa, also links her guilt over getting a cleaner to her worries about what the people she grew up with in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., would think. She says she wrestled for years with whether she should get some help around the house.
“I have a ‘good job’ by rural versus urban standards, and my standard of living can feel . . . pretentious? Like even though I can afford it, no one I knew growing up had a cleaner. So I feel like it’s a very privileged thing, even though my work seems to necessitate having help.”
It wasn’t until she was pregnant with her son — now 4 weeks old — that she decided it would be OK to spend money on housekeeping. “Any physical labour got very hard to do after a day at work. I spoke with my colleagues and realized every single one of them had a cleaner — even the student!”
What will it take for women to sweat less both doing and thinking about the housework? It’s a twopart thing, Milkie says.
“Ideally, some of the outsourced work of creating an ideal home in both the larger sense of taste and furnishings, and of the everyday cleanliness and orderliness of the home, can be ‘outsourced’ by being shared more equally with male partners,” Milkie says. That’s the first piece.
To close the rest of the cleaning gap — whether scrubbing or arranging the outsourcing — will take a societal shift that ushers in true equality in the workplace through avenues such as addressing wage disparity, curtailing harassment and making family leave policies more generous. Policies that put us on a more equal footing at work are especially important for empowering mothers, Milkie says.
“When there is more equality in the workplace, and society more broadly, there will likely be narrower gender gaps in domestic tasks.” Brandie Weikle writes about parenting issues and is the host of the New Family Podcast and editor of thenewfamily.com.