By Shawna Healey
British people, and British women in particular, are being overworked and underpaid, both in domestic and public work settings. The fight for equality in the private sphere has been long and hard, and while women are increasingly encouraged to enter the workplace, working women still face inequality. Even more significantly, there is substantial inequality in the private home sphere. Women frequently carry out invisible emotional labour, which is largely ignored and rarely reqarded.
In 2016, the Office for National Statistics found that women do 40% more unpaid household chores than men, with women averaging 26 hours a week while men contribute around 16 hours. These chores include cooking, cleaning, housework and transport. Eleanor Taylor, a researcher at Natcen which conducts the British Social Attitudes survey, said the ONS findings were “no surprise”.
According to the World’s Economic Forum (WEF), women work an average of 50 more minutes than men per day, contributing to economic inequalities between men and women that could take up to 170 years to close. In the UK, women work around 39 more days, on average, than men.
One reason men do more paid work and less unpaid, private sphere work is because of parental leave. Despite parental leave including leave for maternity, paternity and adoption leave, mothers in the UK receive 52 weeks of maternity leave, paternity leave lasts just 56 days. Studies have shown that, on a global scale, women with full time jobs also still do more housework than their male partners.
The 2016 Australian Consensus showed that ¼ of men who are in full time employment contribute zero hours of household chores each week, while most men who work 35 hours a week complete fewer than 5 hours of domestic chores per week, compared to their female counterparts, who contribute between 5 and 14 hours per week. Additionally, women in Australia are twice as likely to do more than 15 hours per week of unpaid domestic labour compared to their male counterparts.
The Everyday Sexism Project launched a project called #ChoreChallenge in 2016 in conjunction with human rights organisation Breakthrough and the writer and activist Soraya Chemaly, where they asked couples to keep a diary for two weeks of all the chores they did, including emotional labour, and then asked them to “gender swap” for a year. A Mumsnet survey of 1,000 women found that only 5% of their male partners took responsibility for giving the house a weekly clean, compared with 71% of women. The survey also found a stark division in the unpaid labour of childcare, with women being more likely to look after children at weekends, and being expected to take time off when children are sick. This was the case even for women with unemployed male partners.
Among same-sex couples, however, studies show that there is likely to be a fairer division of chores. A survey by the Families and Work Institute found that lesbian couples use “a lot of mixing and matching” when it comes to household chores, though some argue that there is still a somewhat “gendered” division of labour, where the lower-earning partner usually takes on chores that are traditionally deemed to be “women’s work”, such as cooking and cleaning.
When it comes to welcoming women into the workplace, we are further ahead now than we have ever been, but there is evidently still a lot of work to be done.
Featured image and gallery: Hoang Phan Notebooks were carried from one workshop to another. Writers from different generations sat around tables, sharing manuscripts and listening to each other. Outdoors, small groups strolled along Oxford Road, pausing before buildings steeped in literary history. This was the scene during the Manchester Writing School Summer Festival 2026, held…
Featured image: Katja Ogrin With many sore heads and limbs this morning after the most hardcore day of the festival taking place yesterday, many are recovering from the moshing and pit brutality of the previous day’s antics. As the tradition of a morning movie in the Serpents Lair prevails, the crowd sprawls out onto the plush,…
Featured image: Abbi Draper After an electrifying start to the weekend, with temperatures slowly climbing, many lather themselves in suncream, shed their band shirts and rise from their tents to trek towards the arena. Saturday has big things incoming for the humans of Bloodstock 2026. Some pace themselves for the day and hide from the early…
Featured image: Abbi Draper After a memorable Thursday opener, Bloodstock 2026 opens its gates once again onto the Hallowed Grounds of Catton Park, kicking off day two of its 25th-anniversary celebration of metal. As the sun rises on Catton Park, festivalgoers emerge from their tents to prepare for another day of mayhem. The morning brings…
1 Comment
It’s hard to seek out educated people on this subject, but you sound like you realize what you’re talking about! Thanks