Unequal burden of labour: Millions of hours on chores

It is 3.30 pm in Mathare, Nairobi, and 13-year-old Damaris Ndunge and her younger sisters, 10 and six, are busy fetching water from a tap on the ground floor of the building they live in. They run up and down the wet stairs industriously as their easy banter masks their fortitude. 

On the fourth floor, where they live, they have to fill the typical 55-gallon drum in the sitting room that doubles as a kitchen.

In the children’s bedroom, their brother, eight-year-old Joshua Musembi, is busy playing on a mobile phone with a visitor.

Ms Lilian Mumbua, their mother, tells DN2 that Ndunge started doing light work in the house at the age of eight.  “She could cook rice and tea and fetch water,” says the tailor at Gikomba Market. “Right now, she can help with my sewing on the machine.” 

Ndunge just sat her Standard Eight examinations and is waiting to join Form One.

Ms Mumbua says that since her first born daughter started cooking, she has hardly made breakfast for the family.

Ndunge does it before she goes to school. She also helps the other children to prepare for school.

“In the evening because I often come back late, I find the girls having already cooked,” she adds.  Musembi may help with the water once in a while but well, according to his mother “it is not enforced because the girls are there to do this stuff.”

“But why not, if the girls have always done it at an age younger than he is right now?” I ask her, to which she shrugs her shoulders lost for words.  According to a study released last month, girls will spend millions more hours than boys doing household chores, simply because, according to the society, it is their responsibility.

STILL DISADVANTAGED

The study released by the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) to mark the International Day of the Girl on October 11 notes that, while things may have changed since times when a woman’s role was to have children and stay at home, girls today are still disadvantaged when growing up, when it comes to housework.

They do the lion’s share of the work, sacrificing important opportunities to learn, grow and just enjoy their childhood while their brothers get these opportunities, like is happening at Ms Mumbua’s household.

Two out of three girls cook and clean at home, and almost half collect water or firewood. They also perform more “less visible” domestic work like childcare or looking after the elderly, according to the report titled Harnessing the power of data for girls: Taking stock and looking ahead to 2030.

It also found that the extra workload increased with time: between the age of five and nine, girls spend 30per cent more time on chores and by 14, it rises to 50 per cent.

This, Unicef says, is often unpaid work.

While appreciating women’s steady rise in work spaces, the report highlights girls’ disadvantages and attempts to paint a picture of the scourge of the female chore burden.

HOUSEHOLD CHORES

According to the study, globally, girls aged 5-14 spend 550 million hours everyday on household chores, 160 million more hours than boys their age spend.

While gender parity in under-5 mortality has been achieved at the global level, notable gaps persist as the two genders develop.

Worldwide, girls aged 5–9 and 10–14 spend respectively, 30 per cent and 50 per cent more of their time helping around the house than boys of the same age.

A girl aged 5-9 spends an average of almost four hours per week on household chores while older girls aged 10-14 spend around nine hours per week on these activities. In some regions and countries, these numbers are twice as high.

In some regions, the gender disparities are even more severe. The study found that on average in the three countries studied in Africa — Somalia, Ethiopia and Rwanda— (and where we can compare Kenya), with the highest prevalence of involvement in household chores, more than half of girls aged five to 14 spend at least 14 hours per week, or at least two hours per day on household chores. The study showed that in the three countries, 64 per cent, 56 per cent and 48 per cent of the girls in that age bracket spent at least 730 hours per year each on chores.

For the world’s 1.1 billion girls under the age of 18—more than half of them in Asia and a quarter in Africa—instead of being part of the large and vibrant global generation poised to take on the future; their ambition for gender equality in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), according to the picture painted by this report, highlights the preponderance of disadvantage and discrimination they bear on a daily basis.

THE TASKS

In countries with available data on chores by type, almost two thirds of girls aged between 5–14 (64 per cent) help with cooking or cleaning the house.

The second-most commonly performed task among girls this age is shopping for the household (50 per cent), followed by fetching water or firewood (46 per cent), washing clothes (45 per cent), caring for other children (43 per cent) and other household tasks (31 per cent). 

The study acknowledges that the unequal distribution of household chores has a negative impact on girls’ and women’s lives.

According to Unicef’s Principal Gender Advisor Anju Malhotra, the amount of work that girls have to do gets worse as they grow older and this affects their chances to get ahead in life.

“Data tell us that the lives of girls today are better in many respects than those of preceding generations,” she says, “but this unequal distribution of labour among children also perpetuates gender stereotypes and the double-burden on women and girls across generations,” she says.

CHILD MARRIAGE

She says these burdens not only set the stage for unequal burdens later in life but can also limit girls’ outlook and potential while they are still young.

She says the distribution of chores can socialise girls into thinking that such domestic duties are the only roles girls and women are suited for, curtailing their dreams and narrowing their ambitions.

It is probably because of this socialisation that even in adulthood, women globally end up spending an average of 4.5 hours a day on unpaid work around the household. Men spend less than half that much time.

This ends up robbing women of their potential since they are too busy cleaning and cooking, thus have less time for paid work.

In a letter —Bill’s half—by Melinda Gates speaking on the issue of gender inequalities in household chores, she says couples should start having conversations about how they can redistribute unpaid chores more fairly. According to the report, tasks such as gathering water or firewood can also put them at increased risk of sexual violence.

The Unicef report shows that due to the odds stacked against girls, 32 million girls are out of school at the primary level and 29 million at the lower secondary level.

In sub-Saharan Africa, the region most heavily affected by HIV/Aids, three in four newly infected adolescents aged 15–19 are girls.

Worldwide, almost 750 million women and girls alive today were married before their 18th birthday.

While there has been a decrease in child marriage globally, progress has not been equitable; high levels have persisted among the poorest while declines have been limited to the richest.

In the least developed countries, one in four young women aged 20–24 (around 12 million) have had a live birth before 18. Similar proportions are observed in sub-Saharan Africa.

While the document says that household chores undertaken by children in their own homes within reasonable conditions and hours and chaperoned by their caregivers are a normal part of family life, this should be guarded so that it is not detrimental to children’s health, well-being and one sex’s development over the other. 

To achieve the SDGs, recommends Unicef, disparities in the burden of household chores and negative gender patterns must be addressed before they become cemented in adulthood.

STAY IN SCHOOL

“Supporting girls to stay in school and be involved in sports, play and other leisure and asset building activities – and investing in infrastructure, technology and childcare to ease uneven burdens – can help put girls on the path to empowerment and the world on course to greater gender equality,” states the report.

The children’s agency also wants accountability by countries that are dependent on data. Apparently, availability for two thirds of the SDGs indicators relevant to girls is either limited or non-existent.

And where it does exist, it is not being utilised or made available in user-friendly formats.

In some cases, data are not sufficiently disaggregated or analysed by sex and age. In other cases, there is insufficient data collection on issues unique to or of critical importance to girls.