The Festival of Dangerous Ideas

I know, I know, I haven't blogged for ages. Naughty me.

I am posting the talk to gave this morning at The Festival of Dangerous Ideas. Despite a bad cold, I had a terrific time; thanks to everyone who came and those who asked terrific questions and talked to me afterwards.

http://www.sydneyoperahouse.com/whatson/rebecca_huntley.aspx

Australian husbands are the worst in the world and why it is women's fault ...

At The Festival of Dangerous Ideas last year, the president of the Islamic Friendship Association Keysar Trad argued that Australians should be open to the idea of legalizing polygyny, a form of polygamous marriage in which a man has more than one wife at the same time. When I heard about Trad’s idea on the radio, I remember thinking that it was a terrible idea. If Australian men could have more than one wife, this would simply lead to more disappointed Australian women. And husbands would have an excuse to do even less work around the home than they do now. And they would be forced to do even longer hours at work than they do now to afford multiple wives.

Men, women and unpaid work is a topic that has intrigued me since I started researching my PhD in the mid 1990s. My thesis looked at, among other things, the changing status of women from the early eighties to the early nineties. What data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics clearly shows is that during this period women’s workforce participation increased but the division of labour in the home remained practically unchanged. Between 1982 and 1992, married women’s labour force participation rose from around 40% to 53% and yet the Bureau found that during this time span married women with children who were employed full-time spent 19% of their day on unpaid work compared to 11% for men.

This was a period that kicked off with the introduction of the Sex Discrimination Act. It was a formative time for women’s policy development and women’s involvement in government. A lot was happening for women in the public sphere and yet we were still doing almost as much as we had previously in the private sphere of the home.

It got me thinking; why is it that the balance in the current gendered division of unpaid labour is so difficult to shift. And who or what is to blame?

In researching my 2008 book on food I returned to the ABS data to see what had happened since the early 1990s. The news was still discouraging. The 2006 report, How Australians Use Their Time, shows that for men, the average time per day spent on domestic activities has not changed since 1992; it remains fixed at 1 hour and 37 minutes. Over that same period, the average time women spent daily on domestic activities has declined only ten minutes from 3 hours and 2 minutes in 1992 to 2 hours 52 minutes in 2006.

But (I hear you say) men work longer hours at paid work than women do! Yes but that can’t completely account for the disparity. The ABS tells us in their 2001 report on unpaid work that:

When comparing the time spent on household work by women and men employed full-time, women were more likely than men to participate in unpaid household work (95% compared with 84%) and to spend more time on this work (211 minutes and 153 minutes respectively). In addition, while there was a large difference between the time spent on household work by women employed full-time and those employed part-time, there was little difference in the time spent on this work between men employed full-time and part-time.

So in 2010 we can have a female prime minister but men still won’t put away the laundry.

The deliberately provocative title of this talk was inspired by a recent study by economist Almudena Sevilla Sanz of Oxford University who surveyed 13,500 men and women aged 20 to 45 from twelve countries on their attitudes to gender, housework and childcare responsibilities. Sevilla Sanz ranked Australian men at the bottom of the list of twelve. They don’t just trail behind the usual suspects like the Scandinavian countries but also behind the United States, Japan and Austria. This is significant given that Sevilla Sanz found that women and men living in more gender egalitarian countries are more likely to cohabit or marry (and presumably have children and boost the birth rate). Perhaps we should be giving a bonus to men who do housework rather than to women who have babies.

So are Australian men just lazy? I don’t think so. We know they work hard when they are paid to do so. Are they biologically incapable of housework? I don’t think so, if you consider the greater efforts of their brothers in other countries. Will men’s behaviour change over time, with generational change? To some extent yes, but we can’t pin all our hopes on this, as I will explain later. Is the solution to hire cleaners and buy take away every second night? The latter isn’t a healthy option and the former is only an option for some (I often wonder – who cleans for the cleaners?).

My theory is that the reason why men are so slow at changing is that women have let them get away with too little for too long.

Up until this point I have dazzled you with statistics, but now I want to share with you some qualitative research from the most recent Ipsos Mackay Report on the mind and mood of newlyweds, first home buyers and new parents. Our report, entitled Starting Out, is based on a series of 16 group discussions with Australian men and women ranging in age from mid-20s to mid-30s. The fieldwork was conducted in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Wollongong and Ballarat in July 2010.

Listening to the men and women who were involved in this research, the dissonance between the sexes in their approach to unpaid work in the home was obvious.

The men were excited about the prospect of responsibility for a new home, wife and baby. As one young dad put it:

Having a kid does change your attitude to work. It’s a wake-up call. You want to spend less time at work.

Another new father talked about rejecting the pressure to ‘do the hours’ that was present when he was single. He said:

You did the 13 hour days and you didn’t think about it. Now I get in, work and get out.

Yet for the women, their frustration at their partners’ shortcomings when it came to household chores was palpable. They were keen to discuss the constant negotiation around dividing up the domestic load, the flare-ups and resentments that emerge when one partner is exhausted and the other inadequate and incompetent. One woman captured the mood by saying:

My husband says he’ll help more. But he says, not does.

However as we were listening to these couples speak about their lives, it was never obvious what these women were doing to encourage or coerce their partners to share the load. In some cases it was clear they were fearful of demanding too much, lest it lead to conflict or an outright rejection of their requests. Or worse, there was some evidence some women shut down their partners’ offers of help. Consider this exchange between two friends in one of our groups:

Woman 1: I know a few people where the woman earns more than the man, so the man stays at home with the kids and the woman goes back to work.
Woman 2: Yeah, Craig had a good idea about that one. I said no. One, he can’t cook. Two, he really struggles with the washing machine. Three, now that we’re using cloth nappies I think Lilly would be toilet trained or running around nude!


Poor Craig. Surely learning how to boil some pasta and turn a few dials on the washing machine isn’t beyond him.

Will the division of unpaid work in the home change with time? Will the current crop of young men be different? I believe we can pin some of our hopes on generational change but not all. Reading back through thirty years of research reports written by my predecessor Hugh Mackay, it seems that every decade since the 1970s, mothers have believed their well-educated and empowered daughters will demand that their husbands be better than their fathers. In our first ever report, Mothers and Daughters, written in 1979, the mothers were convinced that their daughters would form better, more equitable marriages. As one mother put it:

My daughter is going to be different when she gets married – she won’t put up with as much as I put up with.

On the other hand, the teen daughters in that report (the 40-something women today) were scathing about their fathers’ contribution around the home but suspected their brothers were going to be much the same. Consider the following comments from that report:

Men are sort of pathetic – my Dad thinks he is great if he washes up.

My brothers are just turning out like Dad – they sit around and let Mum and me do everything.


Back to the statistics; the ABS in their 2006 report found that young men spend an average 4 hours 5 minutes a week on domestic activities, while young women spend, on average 6 hours 46 minutes a week.

I often hear women justify their greater domestic burden on the basis that we are just better at housework, more sensitive to dirt and generally place greater emphasis on neatness and order. Really? Better at cooking? Watch a couple of episodes of Masterchef and think again. Better at cleaning? I have a male cleaner who cleans my house much better than I do. You don’t need a vagina to dust a shelf; in fact I would recommend against it in the interests of hygiene. More concerned about domestic order? That might be the case, but I believe that we have been conditioned to be concerned about that, given the different social expectations and judgments made about messy women compared with messy men (remember the original meaning of the word ‘slut’ was ‘a dirty, untidy, or slovenly woman’).

I believe men can change because we find evidence of this in our research all the time. Our first report of the year was on retirees (a silly name for them as they are some of the most vibrant people we encounter in our work). We discovered a new species of male, which we call ‘The Domestic Grandad’. This is a guy who, perhaps as part of the desire for new adventures or to give back to the family after years in the workforce, is very happy to take on the role of primary homemaker and caregiver. In some instances, this is because his wife is still working or more active socially and he feels it is appropriate to be more hands-on on the domestic front. One man we met spoke of this transformation from breadwinner to homemaker:

My wife was a teacher and was teaching full-time, so we talked about it and I said ‘right, I’ll retire, you continue teaching, I’ll look after the house, the shopping, the cooking, the cleaning and everything else’ and she said ‘that’s fine’.
A former truck driver and ex-Vietnam Veteran spoke of the satisfaction derived from looking after yourself:

Now I am retired I don’t see why she needs to be cooking and cleaning after me. I come home and cook a meal for myself. I’ll do the washing up. I’ll throw stuff in the washing machine. It’s not very hard to do.

So what can women and men do to ensure that we start to change the way we do things at home in order to ensure greater equality and, I would argue, greater domestic harmony?

I would say women have to get better at picking our partners not just for their capacity to protect, provide and procreate but for their skills at child minding, cooking and ironing. Once in a relationship we need to be willing to do two things. First we have to make room for men to do stuff. There is a wonderful moment in the recent rom-com Date Night, in which Tina Fey and Steve Carell play a married couple with kids whose relationship is faltering. At a critical point in the narrative, the wife is complaining vociferously about the stress of work and family life, how she has to do everything for everyone. Her husband responds in a way I believe perfectly encapsulates the predicament of men who want to be better husbands but feel blocked in their efforts by their spouses:

I know you work hard but you know what would make the work ten times easier? Me. If you would just trust me to handle things once and a while, but you don’t. You have to do it all yourself, your way. You have me screwing up before I even have the chance to come through for you. And yes maybe I might buy the wrong toy for the birthday party or make the jam sandwich the wrong way. If you just let me do something for you, I might surprise you.

The second thing if we must feel as if we have the right to ask for what we want.

It seems that we even struggle to do this in our paid working lives; women are notoriously bad at asking for a promotion or a wage increase. It’s like we wish the boss would notice how great we are at our jobs and offer us the perks without us having to ask for them.

Similarly, it seems that women feel as if our husbands should notice all the things that need to be done and do them without us asking. Some men are capable of this but others require direct instructions, at least until they are aware, skilled or trained well enough do chores unprompted.

In addition, we should not run from the argument. I can’t tell you how many times friends, colleagues as well as the women in our research reports, say that they decide to pick up the dirty underwear rather than have an argument about it. That might seem like the easy way out at the time but it’s a martyr’s path and a miserable one at that.

Finally, if this all fails then I feel there is some room for a Lysistrata inspired sex strike. In Aristophanes’ play the women in Greece tried to stop the Peloponnesian War by withholding privileges. Similarly we can decide to shut up shop until all the saucepans are washed.

And what should men do? I believe they should grow up. Stop expecting their wives to be their mothers and start cleaning up after themselves. It’s not rocket science.

And both men and women have to do their best to fight the relentless pressures of our labour market where we seem to work more and more and have less and less time for domestic duties, sport, cooking, holidays, community activities and the beautiful, unhurried moments of life.

Real social change often happens slowly. And yet changes in the way we allocate responsibility for unpaid work are happening at snail-like speed. We are still stuck in 1992 and we can’t afford to be. I believe the quality of our relationships and our family life is at stake.

I should end with a note of thanks to my husband who washed up and put our daughter to bed as I wrote this talk.