Working and parenting shouldn’t be the death of women
Last Friday, I got up at 6.45am, mopped up a leaking freezer, breakfasted and dressed myself and two small children, dropped one at school for a sports club and got to the office for 8.30am. I worked an 11½ hour day, came home, sorted two loads of laundry, ate dinner, washed up and fell, finally, into bed. “Great,” I hear you say. “What do you want? A medal?”
No, I don’t want a medal – or to pretend that my day was harder than that of loads of other parents. But nor do I want to hear that this is the “price I have to pay for having it all”. Because, let’s be frank, that’s not having it all. That’s having a life stretched to breaking point, where everything suffers because you’re so goddamned knackered all the time.
And it turns out it really can kill you – if you’re a woman, that is. A new study has shown that women who work a 60-hour week or more over three decades triple their risk of diabetes, cancer, heart trouble and arthritis. The risk starts climbing at just 40 hours, taking a decidedly bad turn over 50. Men, on the other hand, get healthier the longer they work. Researchers believe it’s because women face additional pressure in their home lives.
Well, yes. For most couples, especially those with children, it’s the female half doing most of the domestic stuff. Another recent study of 22 developed countries showed that men do 34 minutes of housework and cooking for every female hour, and provide 24 minutes of childcare to a mother’s hour. Oh, and the UK pay gap is the 15th worst, at 17.4 per cent. Which means not only are we literally killing ourselves working, we’re also doing it on the cheap. Fun times!
Clearly, this system is not working for anyone – women or men – because who wants their wife/ colleague/50 per cent of the population thromboing out because of the way society is structured? So we need to stop dismissing all this stuff as just a “women’s issue” and start talking about it as a collective problem – and one that we need to address, fast.
How? Not by some sort of retrograde domestic revolution where women are shoved permanently back into the home. Many of us want to work, love our jobs and worked damn hard to get them. We shouldn’t have to apologise for wanting to combine work and home life. Practically speaking, many of us also need to work, so let’s stop talking about having a job as if this is only ever a choice women have to make.
Instead, let’s take a more shared approach to everything. Having children is by and large a joint decision – so why do we shift all the responsibility on to the mother when the baby is born? Men need to step up to the plate: take that shared parental leave, discuss who will work part-time – as well as join in the domestic drudgery.
But women also need to stop telling men they’re useless at fathering, encouraging them to see themselves as homemakers, too. And maybe we can both leave the dishes until the morning.