Tuesday, May 21, 2024
Year : 2, Issue : 21
by JESSICA GHOSH
In this era of globalisation, we are seeing forces working for gender parity increasingly and women are more aware of their rights than ever before.
Both men and women are raising their voices for equality and against systemic oppression. But the question arises , is the social scenario really as progressive as it seems? Even in the developed first world countries where ‘equal rights’ are supposedly given and enforced to a large extent?
In the economic sphere, we can see in developed countries like the US the division of labour has moved towards equality in the last 50 years and yet , women are still performing several hours of unpaid labour every week in the form of caretaking or household work. The situation is graver in the third world and developing countries.
Women are getting educated at a higher pace than the previous generations, there has been an improvement of sex ratio at birth, family sizes have fallen. However, the deficiency of work opportunities and the prevailing cultural norms that enforces the idea that women have the primary responsibility of domestic chores and hence for the work to be suitable it should be compatible with these primary responsibilities is what constrains women’s labour supply.
The traditional 9-5 work routine calls for a set amount of work in a particular setting with a fixed standard pay but within the household the responsibility for the bulk of the domestic work falls on the women in comparison to her male counterpart.Women are often held primarily responsible for the domestic tasks like cleaning, cooking, household maintenance, child care and taking care of the elderly even after working the same hours as her male counterpart in the family. This contributes largely to the unpaid labour performed by women and very often leads to exhaustion and burnout due to the daunting amount of mental load taken up by them, from a large amount of which their male counterparts are spared.
Arlene Kaplan Daniels (1987) used the term ‘invisible work’ to describe the various forms of unpaid work undertaken by women in private realms, who ‘remained at home to raise the family and prepare a place of respite for the working man’.
Invisible indeed because only ‘paid work’ accounts for ‘actual work’ in the current economic and social scenario. But gender bias and patriarchal beliefs also result in the economic exploitation of women. The lack of wage parity among men and women is a reality in many sectors all across the world and is again a tool of capitalism and patriarchy to exploit women’s labour. In many parts of the world women are given a much lesser wage than their male co-workers for performing the same work.
Women also perform a lot of emotional labour both at workplaces and in the family.There is a general notion that women are well suited to jobs that require a lot of emotional labour like nursing, teaching,childcare, social work. However, traits like empathy and compassion certainly aren’t innately gendered, and research has shown there is no categorical difference between the male and the female brain. Women are trained to by the patriarchal structures prevalent in the society to be ‘givers’ and shamed if they don’t fall into the traditional roles assigned to them.
Studies show that empathy is a skill that humans are able to perform regardless of their gender yet it has become so heavily equated with being a girl or a woman that it is believed that women are inherently built that way and the years of societal training is overlooked or ignored.
The ‘invisible labour’ done by women clearly forms the backbone of both the economy and the household. It’s time it’s made ‘visible’ , and its acknowledged and accounted for. This calls for a breaking of the patriarchal societal structures and oppressive capitalistic measures that thrive on the exploitation of women through sustainable reforms and creating more awareness , for a better society.
Author is a student
