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Overburdened, underpaid and unappreciated. That’s how many women feel, toiling between their jobs, housework and community involvement.
And while it’s well known that women face the triple burden of work, most of their effort goes unrecognised because, even in 2018, housework that is gendered towards women isn’t considered real work.
In her talk titled When Men Cross Over, at the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s conference on religion, gender and sexuality, Dr Rowanne Marie from the Seth Mokitimi Methodist Seminary said the idea of women’s work and men’s work continues to keep many women confined to domestic chores and positively excludes men from such roles.
“Women function in all three roles and are overburdened with reproductive work such as domestic work, child rearing, adult care and caring for the sick, which unfortunately in many societies is not considered real work even though it is consuming, demanding and tedious,” Marie said.
Through her research, which tracked the lives as well as paid and unpaid experiences of 20 Indian Christian women in Pietermaritzburg between the ages of 21 and 65, she found that some women spent up to 18 hours a day navigating the roles.
“I found that women were misled into believing that cooking, caring for their families and maintaining their households were done in the name of their cultural roles and religious responsibilities. Similarly, men wrongly believed that if they engaged in these roles confined for women, it would be considered a cultural taboo,” she said.
Marie cited previous research by US sociology professor Christine L Williams, which studied when men cross over into female jobs and how social barriers kept them out.
“Almost immediately, a man who does so is viewed with suspicion and is suspected of not being ‘a real man’. There is suspicion that there must be something wrong with him to be interested in such work. These suspicions include that he is gay, lazy or effeminate,” Marie noted.
Women who cross over into male-dominated occupations are not subjected to as much suspicion, but they have to be careful about how they respond to these prejudices in respect of their cultures.
“Interestingly, the images portrayed by a group of young people within this study expressed that the work of the father is secure, offers good pay, earns respect and is rewarding and enjoyable.
"Meanwhile, the work of the mother is tiring, routine, dirty, difficult, boring and not seen as important in the community as a whole, but only as benefitting the individual family,” Marie said of her fieldwork results.
“We need to deconstruct religious and cultural ideologies that reproductive and community roles are not real work and, as such, should not be done by real men.
"We need to reconstruct ideologies on what makes a real man, which involves them in reproductive and community work.”
