Unpaid work bad for moo's mental health September 16, 2022 | Registered: 9 years ago Posts: 3,702 |
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The 2018 American Time Use Survey found that women ages 25-34 spend eight hours a day on unpaid work, versus men’s 3.9 hours. (For ages 35-44, that goes up to 5.2 for men and a whopping 8.8 for women.)
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Re: Unpaid work bad for moo's mental health September 22, 2022 | Registered: 19 years ago Posts: 9,180 |
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One of the more nuanced points in the study was that “women carry the greater mental load of household labour; therefore one unpaid hour is considered denser and more impactful for women than for men, and therefore might not be directly comparable”. It’s partially the reason, the researchers posit, that unpaid labor is less likely to result in poorer mental health for men, which might, in turn, be due to the type of tasks men often take on. While I appreciate the researchers’ suggestion that “outdoor or maintenance” tasks might fall into this bucket of less time-sensitive, possibly more enjoyable unpaid labor, my husband, a tech guy, is as likely to pick up a rake or screwdriver as he is to spontaneously start orating Chaucer from memory. But I take their point. And this mental load – constant, invisible, perniciously seeping into most of my waking and sleeping hours – is something that Ervin, herself, wrestles with in her own home, where she and her husband are raising two daughters.
“I have a particularly egalitarian husband with respect to his views, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to the day-to-day,” she said, uttering what could be the headline of nearly every conversation I have with girlfriends. “And it’s really hard to shift the dial at an individual household level.” How, I wondered, could I force my husband to join me in the trenches of Obsessively Thinking About Labeling the Preschooler’s Change of Clothes for School until that task was completed?