Household labor inequality is a political issue, not a personal one

Household inequality is not trivial, not an accident, and not a communication problem. It's foundational to women's oppression

Nearly everyone is lying about household labor exploitation. Patriarchy promotes ideas that perpetuate its existence. So of course notions that pretend to combat inequality, but which actually reinforce it, are becoming increasingly mainstream.

We often talk about patriarchy as a system we live under—something to fight, to subvert. But oppressive systems build complex mythologies that permeate every aspect of our existence. We are all—every single last one of us—indoctrinated into patriarchal ideologies from birth. We are not under patriarchy, but a part of it. It resides in us, and colors every perception we have.

This is why I so often talk about patriarchy as a brain disease that disrupts critical thinking. Nowhere is this more apparent than in our approach to household labor inequality. Everywhere you look, someone is trying to sell you a system that will magically convince your partner to stop exploiting you. This is the individualization of oppression, the personalization of the political. This approach pretends that collective political realities are nothing more than personal shortcomings. Just communicate better and misogyny will disappear! Have you tried trying?

The result of all of this distraction is more labor for women—read this book, go to therapy, buy this system. Everyone is talking about household labor inequality, but every indication is that the inequality is getting worse, not better, especially in families where both parents work for pay.

To solve a problem, we have to correctly identify it. That demands that we speak unpleasant, unpalatable truths about exploitation, choice, and stolen lives, rather than telling palatable lies about how men really want to do better but don’t know how.

Here are the harsh truths we need to confront about household labor inequality, and the exploitation it enables.

Labor inequality is a cornerstone of patriarchy

Labor inequality didn’t spring up out of nowhere. Oh, no.

Patriarchy is a system men devised to extract resources like labor and sex from women, and to take more than their fair share.

Labor inequality is core to the project of patriarchy, yet the feminist movement is only now beginning to take it seriously.

When men don’t have to worry about their children, their health, their homes, or much of anything domestic at all, they are free to pursue their careers, their dreams, their own lives. They do so directly at the expense of women. Men are stealing women’s dreams to fuel their own. And that’s exactly what patriarchy has always been about.

In societies where all or most forms of official discrimination are banned, labor inequality is the ideal way to reinforce women’s servitude while pretending they have equal opportunities. “See? Nothing is stopping them but they’re struggling! Women are just naturally submissive/inferior/oriented toward having children” is the rallying cry of this discriminatory framework.

Meanwhile, men get to start miles ahead of women and pretend that's because women arbitrarily make up silly busywork for themselves.

Domestic labor is the work of living—not a small inconvenience

Men who saddle women with all of the work, along with their defenders, love to pretend domestic labor is small. “Our only issue is with the laundry,” they’ll say. And then later, “Can you believe she left over some dishes in the sink?” If these issues were really so small, they’d also be easily resolved. He could just wash that one dish he claims the problem is about, or spend 10 minutes on the laundry.

Domestic labor, though, is the work of life. It’s hard, exhausting, and endless. That’s exactly why men (and anyone who holds power relative to their partner) don’t want to do it. If it were easy, it wouldn’t be such a source of dispute, because men wouldn’t go to such great lengths to avoid and trivialize it.

Domestic labor includes all of the tasks necessary to keep a home and family functioning. It includes parenting, cleaning, planning, kinkeeping, advocacy, pet care, medical management, and so much more. It is hours of work every day, and the cost to outsource it would be well into the hundreds of thousands.

This means that in just about every family, the financial value of the labor women do is many times more than the financial value of men’s paid labor—and in more than 70% of families, this occurs in a context where the woman is also working for pay.

I offer a way to tally all the labor here.

Labor inequality depends on a scam

If we assigned any sort of objective moral principles to household labor and looked at the facts without bias, the horror of the exploitation most women face in their marriages would be painfully clear.

Patriarchy specializes in concealing reality, so that men can justify exploitation and women will accept it. Here’s the scam it sells us:

Domestic labor is small, trivial, and unimportant. Most of the tasks it entails are totally unnecessary—just busy work that women create. It’s also unskilled, and easily outsourced.

This convinces both men and women to devalue domestic labor. Men get to pretend they’re not foisting massive work on their partners, and women worry there’s something wrong with them for finding domestic labor challenging. So women feel guilty and work harder, and men feel no guilt at all.

Then, when women get frustrated with the inequality, we demean them and diminish their labor by suggesting they just need to communicate better.

The plain truth is obvious, though: We outsource domestic labor to women because it is valuable and hard, and because it must be done. Men don’t want to do it, but they still want it done. Ergo, patriarchy creates an entire scam to conceal this reality and extract endless labor.

Labor inequality is only trivial if women don’t matter

Most discussions of household labor fall into one of two categories.

The overly earnest self-help version, a la Fair Play and its many franchises, pretends that it’s just never occurred to women to try. The sex that has been taught from birth to communicate, empathize, and understand at the expense of all other pursuits supposedly just needs to do more of these things. Just communicate better! He’s too stupid to understand that children need food to live, and it’s up to you to teach him! This formula often comes with a hefty dose of minimizing the workload, too. Writers will tell women to lower their standards or outsource labor because they can’t sit with the uncomfortable reality that women are working multiple full-time jobs so that their partners can relax.

The dismissive, humorous version treats it all as oh-so-funny. Men, amirite? So stupid? hahahahahahaha. It seems harmless, but treating women’s suffering as humorous is incredibly insidious.

Both approaches share in common a fundamental belief that this issue is pretty trivial. After all, we can laugh about it, and then we can solve it with a simple system or conversation. How big of a deal could it possibly be?

It’s only possible to conceive of labor theft in this way if you think women just matter less than men.

Time is what makes a life. To steal someone’s time is to steal their life.

Even stealing a single hour a day—and most men steal much more—adds up to a massive loss of potential. These men are stealing their partners’ hopes, dreams, relationships, health, and futures. And most of us are watching them do it and pretending it doesn’t really matter.

Consider the massive backlash you might see if a woman did little or no household labor or parenting, left for the weekend to golf, routinely went on trips without her family, never arranged childcare, never contributed to the holidays, and left her partner to care for the kids after recovering from surgery. That’s how we treat people who matter. That’s how we treat men.

Until we start responding with the same outrage when men steal from women, the message about women’s value remains painfully clear.

The inequality is not an accident. That’s why it’s not gender neutral

Inequality is not an accident. Yet mainstream discussions of this issue continue to pretend otherwise, telling women that if they just present the issue correctly, everything will change.

Inequality doesn’t just happen. It arises because it benefits men, who hold most of the power in patriarchal cultures. Pretending otherwise is a great way to gaslight women into thinking the problem is an individual issue rather than a political one.

No wonder we love to pretend that this issue is gender neutral. So we talk about imbalance in marriage rather than exploitative men. Or we pretend “parents” are drowning and exhausted when it’s really just mothers. This is a great way to conceal the real problem, and the real source of the problem.

Lying about labor inequality is a profitable industry

Women are suffering massively under the system that foists an entire culture’s worth of devalued labor onto already-exhausted and oppressed women.

The clearest evidence of this can be found in how much they’re willing to pay for false promises about improving labor inequality. Gurus everywhere promise women they can change things with the right system, therapist, coach, or mediator.

The truth is dark, though: It’s this way because he likes it this way. If he wanted to change, he would. Without real consequences—the end of the relationship, usually—men who treat their partners as appliances almost never change. Even when threatened with the end of the relationship, most men would rather gaslight, lie, and find a replacement appliance than make lasting change.

Earlier this year, I started joining support groups for women seeking more household labor equality. I found lots of excuses for lazy men. What I did not find was any lasting change.

The people running these groups, writing these books, and offering these coaching services are making massive profits on the false promise of equality. Because they know equality is important. But because they can’t deliver it, they can continue encouraging people to invest in one more group, one more session, one more retreat, profiting off of desperation while women continue to suffer.

These coaches, therapists, and faux experts are often the same people who say I’m too mean, too direct, too eager to blame men. But the real cynicism is profiting off of desperation without offering truth or real change.

Women cannot fix it alone, and no amount of self-help will change that

Why is it that virtually all advice about domestic labor inequality targets women?

The answer is simple: It’s because women are the only people who care about the issue. Men have already got a great deal, and have absolutely zero reason to change.

The only way this actually changes is if men change their behavior—something women cannot compel men to do, because patriarchy makes the cost of pushing on a man extraordinarily high.

Men can become angry, aggressive, even violent when women ask them to change their behavior. The threat of violence backs up every unequal relationship—whether it’s real violence, or just the knowledge that men can and do get away with violence against women.

And a patriarchal court system makes leaving a relationship potentially dangerous. If there are children, the woman may have to prioritize their safety, since courts will happily give joint custody to all but the very worst men. Somehow, men can’t be expected to care for children equally during marriage, but divorce magically instills in them the skills they allegedly lacked before.

Leaving is painful and dangerous. Heterosexual relationships deliberately trap women, and we need to be more honest about that.

When children are involved, it’s a form of child abuse

Labor inequality includes the labor of parenting well. When children live with a parent who does not want to do this incredibly challenging work, they suffer. They either are neglected, facing safety issues and excessively permissive parenting, or they experience extreme authoritarianism, including emotional and physical violence. Often men parent with a combination of the two, choosing whichever is convenient in the moment.

Parenting via impulse rather than learning how to parent well profoundly damages children. It’s not a difference in parenting styles. Yet when parents divorce, courts pretend both approaches are equally valid, punishing children and treating them like property when they send them to live part-time with incompetent parents. This fear is a key reason women do not leave.

It always occurs alongside other issues

I hear a lot of “Well, sure, if there are other issues aside from the inequality, that’s serious.”

This frames inequality as fundamentally unserious, because we think women’s lives and time do not matter. Beyond this problem is the fact that household inequality never occurs in a vacuum. To sit idly by while his partner works, a man at the very minimum must:

• prioritize his wants over his partner’s needs

• not love his partner enough to care about her well-being

• ignore his partner’s requests for fairness

• be uninterested in being a good or present parent

These are all catastrophic shortcomings that render a man unworthy of love, let alone a continued relationship or continued deference. But in most cases, women already know things are bad. The real reason they cannot leave is some combination of financial insecurity, fear for the children’s safety, and threatened or actual violence from the man.

Inequality is never the only problem. But it is always the problem that signals a deeper pattern of abuse. Until we stop pretending otherwise, it will never change.

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