The Telegraph picked up a recently published London School of Economics research about housework. They were in lonely company. The piece did not see the light of day in the Financial Times, The New York Times or the Washington Post. Why not? Could it be that housework is not considered a serious topic?
And yet, to researchers looking at issues like divorce rates and career advancement, housework is a serious topic. The mop is not as benign as it seems.
The London School of Economics newly released a study showing that divorce rates are lower in families where husbands help with housework. Lead researcher Dr. Wendy Sigle-Rushton said that "the fathers' unpaid work entirely offsets the increased probability of divorce resulting from the mothers' participation in paid work". These findings of 3,540 married British couples demonstrate that when housework is shared, or alleviated from the women's plate, families do better.
This study follows one by researchers at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University looking into the role housework plays in careers of highly trained academic scientists. Published in the January issue of Academe, the Stanford study shows that women scientists do 54% of the cooking, cleaning, and laundry in their households; men scientists do 28%. This translates to over 10 hours per week for women who are already working as professional scientists nearly 60 hours per week. These findings show that outsourcing housework is a smart strategy that helps women to succeed at the job.
Perhaps gains to family and career are not enough to make front-page news. What about growth of GDP?
The Stanford study looks deeper into the issue of housework. Instead of recommending that each individual working woman find a housework solution, the Clayman Institute recommends that employers take housework out of the home.
Many employers already offer health care and childcare supplements; some even support housing benefits. The Clayman Institute recommends that institutions provide a package of flexible benefits that employees can customize to support any private side of life that saves time and hence enhances productivity, including housework.
Providing benefits for domestic labor revalues housework that is not fully represented in GDP. Housework is primarily invisible labor carried out by women -- some even Nobel Prize winners -- behind closed doors and often in the wee hours of the morning. Increasing the incidence of outsourced labor with a smart benefits package can help bolster GDP, even in down times.
Hilary Abell, Executive Director of WAGES Cooperatives, says that household income goes up +50% when a woman joins a professional cooperative cleaning service. She has access to benefits herself, including vacation and sick day coverage, and consistent income. WAGES Cooperatives revenues went up +5% last year despite the down economy. Outsourced household labor must be professionalized responsibly, and models like WAGES Cooperatives prove that this is possible.
While U.S. employers generally do not provide a benefit to assist with the burden of housework, a few in other parts of the world, such as Sony Ericsson in Sweden, do. There the company pays for housecleaning from select service providers. The employee then pays the government tax imposed on the benefit. The Swedish government considers this a win-win situation for those involved: workers, household cleaners, and employers.
The time is ripe to apply some "spring cleaning" to old beliefs about the mop. The next time a major institution publishes a study on housework, we hope to see it on the front page of the news section. This private work needs to be put onto the national grid. Families win. Careers advance. And GDP, well, gets cleaned up.
Our model is a win-win for women who provide these professional housecleaning services and the women and men who use the services, relieving themselves of some of the housework burden and getting healthier homes in the process.
Although WAGES is currently working mainly in the San Francisco Bay Area, we are looking to expand around the country. The buzz around this article and this issue is another sign of the growing market for housecleaning services, especially those that support our triple bottom line of people, planet and prosperity. As with any of our consumer and personal choices, we look for the win-win - outsourcing housework can be great if everyone involved is treated well. Please visit our website to learn more: www.wagescooperatives.org
Housework and childcare should certainly be included in the GDP. This unpaid labor in the home is one of the main reasons women's wages are still so much lower than men's wages. Female job ghettos have traditionally been the lowest paid with the least benefits.
For me - and yes, I am a feminist - the issue isn't what is "men's work" or "women's work", it is balancing economic self-sufficiency with economic interdependence and the way gender roles play out in achieving that balance. Whether or not taxpayers subsidize couples that choose to have one party stay home is an entirely separate issue unless and until the subsidy is tied to GENDER rather than to staying home itself.
Personally I've never been comfortable with the idea of being dependent on gaining community property rights over income that comes on a paycheck with somebody else's name on it. I have also never been comfortable that my sex entitles me to pull a veto and demand that someone else support me. The price for such a veto seems too high.
My colleagues and I at Feminist Economics, the journal that published Wendy Sigle-Rushton's research, were delighted to see that her excellent article on men's contribution to housework and its correlation with divorce rates was highlighted in the Huffington Post.
Please note, however, that while Wendy Sigle-Rushton is a Senior Lecturer at the London School of Economics (LSE), which publicized her study, her work on this topic appeared as a featured article in Feminist Economics, a highly respected, peer-reviewed journal based at Rice University in Houston. The article ran in our issue of April 2010 (16.2).
We would greatly appreciate it if a note on where the study was published could be appended to this article. For your information, here is the link to the Feminist Economics website, which contains information on current articles, including Wendy Sigle-Rushton's: http://www.feministeconomics.org. Please also note that the complete text of the article may be easily accessed through a university library.
Many thanks.
Yours sincerely,
Polly Morrice
Senior Editor
Feminist Economics
Center for the Study of Women,
Gender, and Sexuality
Rice University
Houston, TX 77251
Thank you for making this clarification. While researcher Wendy Sigle-Rushton of the London School of Economics authored the article, the article was published in Feminist Economics, April 2010.
Best,
Lori Nishiura Mackenzie
I have thought so often about the generations of women who ignore the lessons of the past,
and buy into the home maker b.s. belief that "he'd never do that to me and the kids".
Until - and I am less and less convinced this will ever happen - each successive generation of women
learns to respect the hard work done on their behalf by FEMINISTS who have fought for generations for recognition of the monetary value of child rearing, home making, whatever you want to call it, women will continue to do this to themselves. Feminists NEVER disdained or discounted stay at home moms, but in order to undermine that movement, the rightwing said feminists scorned their sisters who worked at home, and their stay at home sisters bought that b.s. I started hearing the younger generations disclaim feminism and thought, OMG here we go AGAIN. They are undermining themselves AGAIN!
workers, household cleaners, and employers."
And once again, the concept of cleaning house as 'work' is avoided through the language used.
Shall we pay men for mowing the lawn, changing the oil in the car, and fixing the sink?
And yes, all unpaid household work should be included.