The Persistent Issue of Gender Inequality at Home

While women have achieved significant strides in equality within the working world, and men are taking more responsibility at home, a recurring theme in my work with women in individual and couple therapy sessions is the inequality they experience in their private lives. At home, they often experience frustration with the unequal distribution of household chores.

The Disparity in Household Chores

This disparity is particularly noticeable in heterosexual relationships, with women typically handling about 65% of the physical household work. My female clients often find themselves tasked with ongoing responsibilities such as cooking and cleaning, while their male partners tend to take on more sporadic chores like yard maintenance. This imbalance can be particularly taxing, as routine household tasks are seemingly endless. As one of my female clients recently noted, “The hedge is once every two or three weeks, but the house always needs cleaning.”

The Pandemic a Reflection Point for Domestic Inequality

This disparity often goes unnoticed. The pandemic was a particularly powerful reflection point for many of my couples, female individual clients, and even myself in a long-term romantic relationship. While many partners were working from home during the pandemic, it was clear that double work was often done by women who were working, cooking, doing domestic chores, and childcare duties while still trying to do meetings and work tasks from home.

The Dual Burden on Women in the Caribbean

Since so many women in Barbados and the rest of the Caribbean work, domestic duties compound their demanding schedules. In therapy, these women frequently voice concerns about their physical chores and the mental and emotional labour they shoulder regularly.

Understanding Mental and Emotional Labour

Mental labour refers to women’s efforts to manage their family lives, encompassing tasks that require significant emotional and physical investment. For instance, in one case, a couple I was working with planned to go on holiday. Still, the woman was tasked with planning the family vacation, including booking tickets, securing passports and visas for the children, organising the itinerary, and ensuring suitable attire for the trip. Women often become the default managers of household responsibilities, a role that significantly drains their emotional and physical resources.

Emotional labour involves women’s emotional work, such as helping their children regulate their emotions, tamping down toddler tantrums, and following a child’s story as they talk about their day at school. This emotional labour can be taxing.

The Impact of Unpaid Work on Women's Health and Relationships

The women’s movement has shed light on the extent of unpaid work performed by women and its impact. This additional burden deprives women of self-care and leisure time and affects their physical and emotional health. Many women report feeling exhausted and discuss how this disproportionate workload fosters resentment and unhappiness.

Ultimately, the strain of unpaid household, mental, and emotional labour also weighs heavily on women’s romantic relationships. The uneven allocation of chores frequently leads to diminished satisfaction within these partnerships.

Approaches to Addressing Gender Imbalance

So, how can women and, just as importantly, men address the gender imbalance in household work and emotional labour? In therapeutic conversations, one way I have often sought to broach this issue is to dissect culture with my clients, mainly what they have learned about gender and the gendered assumptions that might underlie the unequal distribution of work.

The Role of Cultural Perceptions in Gender Roles

One way I often describe gender to clients is that it is “like the air we breathe” all around us but never visible; in other words, it is invisible but pervasive. Clients can then talk about what they saw their male and female caregivers doing in the house, have conversations about what they learned about gendered work and its effects, and consider ways they might even want to do something different in their relationships. Once this conversation begins, many clients become intrigued with ways to liberate their household and each other and experience more equality and joy at home and in their relationship.

Family Dynamics and Transition Periods

Transitions in family dynamics offer a prime chance to reevaluate and reshape the traditional assignment of domestic roles. One particularly relevant transition is the arrival of children, a phase often marked by increased childcare, household, and emotional responsibilities traditionally shouldered by women. However, this transition period presents an opportunity for both men and women to engage in meaningful discussions about their preferred distribution of parenting duties and responsibilities, paving the way for a more balanced approach to family life.

Towards Greater Equality and Well-being in Relationships

The persistent issue of gender imbalance in the distribution of household chores and emotional labour affects the physical and emotional health of women. Despite progress in workplace equality, this imbalance remains pronounced in women’s at-home lives. Particularly in heterosexual relationships, women are often left to manage not only the bulk of physical chores but also the mental and emotional labour involved in family life. Couples can address these imbalances through conversations that explore cultural assumptions about gender roles and use transitions as opportunities to work towards a more equitable distribution of household responsibilities. By engaging in these discussions, there is an opportunity to foster greater equality, satisfaction, and joy within relationships and improve women’s overall physical and emotional well-being.

Jomo Phillips, Couple & Family Therapist