Zeno's Bar & Grill

Last week, the author of the blog Half Changed World started keeping track of time spent on housework as an experiment stimulated by recent articles and discussions about the amount of time spent on housework and how that affects women’s work outside the home.

This is a fascinating idea…sort of like politics, sociology and anthropology all rolled into one. Half Changed World invited others to report their own surveys, so we started to log our time, but then ran into a big, fat roadblock. Or several.

First of all, how do you tally the work? Do you count all the work that goes into running a household and family, or just the work that you do personally? It seemed to us that the point would be to keep track of everything, including work that you pay others to do in order to get a count of the “gross housework product”.

But then, how to handle the kids? Because if you have even one child under school age, then it means that child needs care essentially 24/7 (even if some of it is done by others: preschool, babysitter etc), so then why tally the laundry, dishes, cooking etc., which are just a subset of that bigger picture.

Essentially, what we concluded from this is that until your kids go to school, someone is doing a heck of a lot of child care every day, whether it’s the mom, the dad or a sitter. Does this mean that it’s really having kids that changes things so much for women career-wise, since they are more often the ones who end up staying at home or working fewer hours, while their husbands do the work outside the home?

As a corollary to all this, another way of “counting” housework is to count only the work that’s done when both parents are available, which gets to the heart of equality questions on the home front. That is, men shouldn’t be penalized for doing less housework when they’re outside the home earning money to keep the whole ship afloat.

It seems to us that the work done when both parents are available should be split 50:50 (this would be mornings, evenings and weekends for most families in which the husband and/or wife work conventional 9-5 jobs). For stay-at-home (and part-time working) moms, their work with kids and household would be considered their “day job”, and in their off time (defined by when their spouses were not working) they would have no more or less responsibility for the kids and house than their husbands.

--Melanie & Kelly