TURNING BACK THE CLOCK ON FEMINISM

Will men and women ever have the same roles at home?

Ah, working from home together. The joy of sharing your lives, jointly raising a family, pottering about the house you both have time to lavish care and attention on. A perfect partnership dream sold on a pandemic nightmare.

Oops. Scratch all of the above. While many companies continue to sell this utopia of domestic bliss, the bitter truth for so many women is it’s actually taking the domestic… er, mickey.

A new scientific study of parents who do not regularly visit an office or place of work has revealed that mums often ends up doing MORE of the childcare and chores while dads do LESS.

How is this still a thing? It’s 2022, not 1958. We burnt our bras and aprons 50 years ago, so why are we now still burning dinners for our menfolk when they’re at home just like us? (OK, you may not burn dinner but I can burn water, just saying.)

According to the University of Essex and University of Kent researchers, this is because homeworking fathers fear they may ‘lose their masculinity’ if they take on more routine tasks.

‘Flexible working arrangements do change the gender-normative assumptions or power dynamics relating to who should carry out housework and childcare,’ professor Heejung Chung explains. ‘But it can remove work-related restrictions that might have prevented mums from carrying out both paid and domestic work.’

Basically, it means we’re still working just as hard, if not more so.

The actual stats are frightening. Women spend an average of

13.4 hours on housework a week, while men manage a paltry 5.5. Additionally, 54% of mums reported they were mainly responsible for childcare.

Naturally, money has an impact here too. The more wealthy you are the more likely you are to share chores.

For many working-class women, attempting to do their jobs at home made them feel more responsible for the scrubbing and the nappies.

The only slight glimmer of hope was where flexitime working was involved. Where one parent was on a night shift and

‘MUMS STILL DO MORE CHORES’

the other covering a day job, the labour division was more equal. But the cynical part of me says, well, it would be, wouldn’t it? If you can’t afford childcare or cleaners, you have little choice.

Curiously, this comes at a time where more and more middleclass women are choosing to be stay-at-home housewives – literally turning the clocks back to the 1950s, where they are there waiting to welcome their man from work to a spotless home, immaculate children and dinner on the table.

Now, you may not agree with this, but surely the point of modern-day feminism is that EVERY woman has a right to choose how she lives her life – whether that be stripper, brain surgeon or homemaker?

Still making me a bit twitchy though. What message are those women passing on to their sons? And what will those boys expect from partners as men?

But ladies, stand by that perfectly made bed, because there IS good news. Yet another survey (this one from Australia) has revealed that the more equally domestic chores are shared, the greater the women’s feeling of relationship satisfaction and, in turn, sexual desire.

In short, him giving the house the once-over gets him more chance of a, well, leg over.

Look, who cares if this one is actually accurate? If it’s enough to get him scrubbing that bathroom while you put your feet up with a copy of Woman’s Own and a nice cuppa it sounds good to me.