The Myth That Gets Men Out of Doing Chores (The Atlantic)
BY JOE PINSKER
They’re just as good at recognizing messes as women—they just don’t feel the same pressure to clean them up.
“They can run businesses, but they can’t figure out a mop,” Jill Yavorsky, a sociologist at UNC Charlotte, says of men like this. “It isn’t, of course, a lack of skills, but rather the privilege and gender norms that enables them to bargain their way out of this type of work” at home.
This suggests that if men are generally messier than women, the root of that gap might lie in how much of the burden of cleaning up is pushed onto women by cultural default. This pattern matches up with the distribution of chores in practice: In the U.S., women on average spend about an hour a day cleaning and doing laundry, compared with roughly 20 minutes a day for men. (Meanwhile, men average about half an hour more leisure time a day than women.)
I’m a boyfriend who uses weaponised incompetence. Can I change? (GQ)
BY SAMMI GALE
On TikTok, #weaponisedincompetence describes millions of men not pulling their weight in their relationships, hiding from housework and life admin behind an attitude of ‘you’re so much better at this than me, so why don’t you just do it?’ Sammi Gale realised he was one of them, so he decided to try and change
Couples divvy up labour in all sorts of ways. But, zoom out, and the data paints a stark picture. In 2016, the Office for National Statistics found that on average women did almost 60 per cent more of the unpaid work than men. Perhaps more disturbing was the finding that married women with male partners do more housework than single mothers. It is this sort of imbalance that is causing TikTokkers to sharpen their knives and fight back against male incompetence. Adam Heath Avitable, co-host of the podcast Dating Kinda Sucks – whose own TikToks on the subject of relationship dynamics have over 4 million likes – told me that “there is just this huge environment of people who sometimes need to be called out.” In his videos, wearing a blue beanie with a trademark portrait of himself lying in a bath full of bacon in the background, he does just that. “If you’re not capable of understanding that dishes need to be done,” he says in one, “or that the laundry needs to be put away or that the floor needs to be swept then you’re a fucking moron, OK? And you are an immature, little infantile baby.”
If that sounds tough, it’s meant to. “I think it has to be said harshly,” Avitable tells me. “Like, cleaning the house is not your partner’s fucking job.” For him, domestic labour is an obligation, “like brushing your teeth in the morning.” He references the Guys Live In Apartments Like This meme for how widely acceptable and even funny society finds a guy’s domestic abjection – the mattress on the floor, nothing on the walls, a Playstation. “It’s this case of arrested development,” Avitable says, describing “a type of blindness” in men who “don’t see things that need to be done because they’re so used to someone else doing it for them.”
Why Teen Boys Have More Leisure Time Than Teen Girls (The Atlantic)
BY JOE PINSKER
Mothers tend to spend more time with daughters cooking and cleaning, while fathers tend to spend more time with sons relaxing.
Parents can play a major role in generating these inequities. Research on housework suggests that parents introduce kids to tasks differently, depending on their gender. Mothers, for instance, tend to spend more time with their daughters cooking, doing housework, and shopping than they do with their sons. Fathers, meanwhile, are more likely to involve their sons in home-improvement projects and leisure activities such as watching TV. “Kids’ activities are in part driven by their own parents’ gender division of labor,” says Jill Yavorsky, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. “These really mirror each other in a lot of ways.”
Parents send other unequal messages to their children about the work they do around the house. According to data covering about 10,000 families released last year by BusyKid, an app for paying children allowance, the average boy earned $13.80 a week, while the average girl received $6.71—a pay gap at least as wide as the one between adult men and women in the workplace. It’s worth noting that this gap—like the aforementioned disparities in time use—forms well before kids grow up and enter the workforce.
We can make birth safer for Black mothers. Here’s how. (Vox)
BY ANNA NORTH
What doulas, midwives, and policymakers are doing to end the maternal mortality crisis.
Over the last 30 years, nearly every wealthy country in the world has made it much safer for people to have babies. Only one outlier has moved in the opposite direction: the United States, where the rate of people dying in childbirth continues, stubbornly and tragically, to rise. In 2021, 1,205 US women died from birth-related causes, up from 754 in 2019. Many of those deaths — a full 89 percent in one Georgia study — are potentially preventable with the proper care.
There’s some dispute over whether the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention overcounts maternal deaths, but experts agree that regardless of methodology, mortality rates are troublingly high — and Black birthing people are at disproportionate risk. Nationwide, the maternal mortality rate for Black women is 2.6 times the rate for white women. Some regions have even bigger disparities: In Chicago, the rate for Black women is almost 6 times the rate for white women; in New York City, it’s 9 times.
Even Breadwinning Wives Don’t Get Equality at Home (The Atlantic)
BY ALIYA HAMID RAO
When Americans think about fixing gender equality, they tend to focus on the workplace. But gender equality for women still lags in another realm: their own houses.
Why are Americans so reluctant to acknowledge wives who are breadwinners? One reason is that couples in the U.S. continue to idealize and privilege a family structure with a male breadwinner and a female homemaker. Recognizing women as breadwinners threatens the idea that a family fits into that mold. When wives earn more than husbands, couples often reframe the value of each spouse’s work to elevate the husband’s work as being more prestigious and downplaying the importance of the woman’s job.
Breadwinning wives also don’t get parity in how household chores are divvied up. As wives’ economic dependence on their husbands increases, women tend to take on more housework. But the more economically dependent men are on their wives, the less housework they do. Even women with unemployed husbands spend considerably more time on household chores than their spouses. In other words, women’s success in the workplace is penalized at home.
American motherhood vs. the American work ethic (Vox)
BY RANI MOLLA
Working motherhood is getting harder. Let’s fix that.
“There is a whole term for what happens to women as they become mothers, and ‘the mommy track’ isn’t a compliment,” Martha Shaughnessy, a founder of a PR agency and a mother with two young children based in San Francisco, said. “Knowing there’s a pejorative term for what a male-dominated workforce thinks of working moms leads to pressure to be better and do more than male or non-mother peers.”
Working from home and work-from-home technology have been a double-edged sword for working mothers: It gives women the opportunity to actually do their outsized share of labor.
“While there’s no expectation for me to be responding to emails at all hours, I often feel the need personally to ‘get ahead’ or respond to colleagues in other geographies through email response in the evening after my kids are asleep,” Brenna Fitzgerald, a vice president of corporate communications in Boston and a mother to a 6-year-old and a 3-year-old, said. “It was a constant struggle to navigate trying to excel at work, take the best care of my children, be a partner to my husband, and clean up the hundreds of toys (and Legos, so many Legos) that were used each day.”
For more ‘Ethics in the News’ and to keep updated with the latest posts, please consider subscribing to the The Ethics and Society Blog today!
The Ethics and Society Blog 