6.5. Balancing home and work

Task 1. Look at these newspaper and magazine headlines. Discuss with a small group:

• What do you think each article will be about?

• What topic do all the articles have in common?

Task 2. Look at the family situations listed below. For each situation, discuss with your class whether the husband or wife should do each of the following: cook, clean, take care of children, and pay the bills.

• The husband works and the wife stays home.

• The wife works and the husband stays home.

• Both husband and wife work, but the husband earns more.

• Both husband and wife work, but the wife earns more.

Task 3. Read the text "Balancing Home and Work" and translate it in the written form.

Balancing home and work

Here is one woman's story of balancing home and career. Rachel always dreamed of having a large family and an interesting career. She now has four children and works full-time.

I really have two full-time jobs. My job in the city is in investment bank­ing and I really like it. It's interesting and important. My other job is at home - raising four kids and keeping the household going. I like this job too, and though it's not always interesting, I know it's important. But when I'm not cleaning up the kitchen after a meal, or picking up the kids' things from the floor for the millionth time, or feeding the dog, then I'm falling asleep during my youngest daughter's piano practice. When I do have some free time, I've usually got a headache. The reality is that, most of the time, it's just too much.

Role overload

Rachel has role overload¹⁶. That is, she has difficulty combining the roles of worker and of wife and mother. Role overload is one of the disad­vantages that today's women face. While both parents are more "stretched" when the woman of the household works, it is usually the woman who does most of the childcare and housework. Most studies investigating housework conclude that women (whether employed or not) do "the lion's share" of housework and childcare. An Australian study, for example, found that employed wives did 69.3 hours of unpaid work around the house during a two-week period while employed hus­bands did approximately 31.2 hours. A study by Bird (1999) shows a sim­ilar picture for U.S. households. In this study of 1,256 adults, Bird showed that while working women certainly want an equal share of housework, they "shoulder the main burden" by doing approximately twice as much as their spouses. Her study showed that after marriage, women gain 14 hours of household chores per week, while their hus­b

Even if women work outside the home, they tend to do most of the housework.

Even if women work outside the home, they tend to do most of the housework.

ands gain only 90 minutes.

Value of housework

There have been some attempts in the United States, Europe, and Australia over the past few decades to encourage governments to pay people for the housework they do. A U.S. organization called the Wages for Housework Campaign argued for many years that housework was boring and degrading because it was unpaid, and that payment would improve the status of women in society overall. More recently they have argued for housewives to be included in the labor force and for unpaid housework to be included in calculations of a nation's wealth, for exam­ple, the gross national product (GNP). They have argued that this would make housework more visible, and could possibly lead to greater invest­ment in programs to help women.

So far, no government has seriously considered paying people for housework. This is not surprising when you consider how difficult it would be to implement such a scheme. The first problem would be to determine how much people would be paid. In 1995 the United Nations estimated the annual value of women's unpaid work at $11 trillion worldwide. An Australian government study in 1991 calculated that if someone was to be paid to do all the housework in one home it would be worth 400 Australian dollars a week (equivalent to about 250 U.S. dollars at that time). However, there would be more problems to "iron out." Would everyone get the same amount? Which tasks would and would not be paid for? How would the government know if the work was done?

Other consequences of being a woman

Role overload is not the only disadvantage women of today may expe­rience. A negative self-concept and lack of self-confidence are other dis­advantages. In a study in which women and men were told they were incapable of performing a mental task, the women were more likely than the men to believe that they were incapable. Another study showed that women are more likely to think their suc­cess is due to luck than to their own ability. A further problem for many mothers is the difficulty they have in finding new interests and activities when their children leave home.

But there are also advantages to being a modern woman. One is the likelihood of living longer. In 1998 in the United States, average life expectancy for men was 73.9, whereas for women it was 79.4. Other advantages are being able to express emotions more easily, hav­ing a closer bond with children, and not having one's identity tied to employment. One big advantage today is that women have so many options. It is socially acceptable to work full-time if you have children, but it is also acceptable to be a full-time mother and stay at home, or to work part-time.

Avoiding the housework Jokes about men and housework are common in TV shows and newspaper comics. But research shows that there may be at least a little truth in these jokes. Mackay (Kissane 1990) revealed four tactics that men sometimes use to avoid doing household chores: Helplessness – he agrees to cook but asks directions for every step. Getting the kids to do it – he insists that they are old enough to help and he is not needed. Going slowly – he hopes that his wife will find it more trouble than it is worth to ask him for help again. The ‘black-cloud’ strategy – he does the chores, but so ungraciously that the wife feels angry and upset. Men in this study justified their tactics by claiming that women ‘want it both ways’. They also argued that they had never agreed to the concept of sharing housework.

Task 4. Answer the following questions.

1. What is the point of Rachel's story?

   • that you should not work full-time if you are a woman with children

   • that it can be difficult to combine full-time work and raising a family

   • that women do most of the housework even if they work full-time

2. What does research tell us about the way most men and women share housework?

3. What information can you find in the text to suggest that governments will never pay people to do housework?

4. Make a list of all the disadvantages and advantages of being a woman mentioned in the text.

5. How do some men try to get out of doing housework?

Task 5. Work with a partner. Find these figures of speech in the text and work out what they mean from the context and the words themselves. Then complete the sentences below using one of the words or expressions.

1. stretched (par. 2)

2. the lion's share (par. 2)

3. shoulder the main burden (par. 2)

4. iron out (par. 4)

5. want it both ways (boxed text)

1. Kathy and Jim fought about the housework again. I hope they can ________ their differences.

2. She's working at two jobs, raising a son, and going to night school. She must feel so _______.

3. Julia wants to be successful, and she wants to be a perfect mother. Women like Julia ______________.

4. In traditional families, the man is expected to _________ of supporting his wife and children.

5. Mark and Lola decided to switch roles in their marriage. Now she does most of the gardening and repair tasks, and he does ____________ of the cooking and cleaning.

Task 6. Insert the expressions from the list into the gaps.