In the poor world

• Women in Pakistan spend an average of 63 hours a week on domestic work⁴.
• Carrying water in Tanzania takes 4 hours of a woman's time and consumes between 12% and 27% of her day's calories⁵.

• Grinding grain, by hand, for a family in Mexico takes between 4 and 6 hours a day⁵.
• In India grinding grain takes 1.3 hours a day even when a mill is available⁵.
• In Indonesia women spend over 3 hours a day just preparing food⁵.

In the rich world

• Housewives in Australia do between 50 and 80 hours of housework a week⁶.
• One survey in the US put the figure even higher, at 99.6 hours a week⁷.
• Women with small children in the UK devote 50 hours a week to child-care alone⁸.
• Women in Canada did an average of 50 hours housework a week in 1978⁹.
• A survey of 650 UK housewives found that they vacuumed the living room carpet an average of 215 times a year and cleaned the bath 182 times¹⁰.

In a Rwanda village women work three times as much as the men. This is because women do virtually all of the domestic work three quarters of work in the fields and half of work with the animals. Meanwhile the men tend the banana trees and do most of the paid work outside the home⁴.

The value of housework can be calculated by costing the various component tasks at market rates paid to cleaners, cooks, laundry workers etc. UK-based insurers, Legal and General, calculated the cost of replacing a housewife's services in the event of her death or disability in 1987 and came up with the following figures¹²:

These figures underestimate the value of unpaid domestic work by at least 30%³ because of depressed market rates for the equivalent work (see Pink collar workers).

The price of a wife
Other research has come up with the following values
for a woman's unpaid domestic work in the home:

• US: $6,500 per year in 1977. That's 6 times the US military budget and half of total GNP⁷. If being on call' for child-care is counted, the cost rises to $700 per week (1979)⁷. A 1980 estimate put the annual value at $14,500⁴.

• CANADA: $6,000 per year in 1978, which adds up to $26 billion or27% of GNP¹¹. A survey in 1975 found that 49% of people thought women should be paid for housework⁹.

• UK: $360 (200) per week for child-care alone, which would total $27 billion or 6% of GNP (1984)⁸.

A day in the life

How he helps

• Men in the US do an average of 1.6 hours of housework a day, irrespective of whether their wives / partners have jobs outside the home¹³.

• In the UK 93% of the cleaning and 90% of child-care is done by women¹⁰, who also prepare 77% of evening meals¹⁴.

• One survey of UK men found that only 2l % had ever washed any clothes and only 19% had ever done any ironing¹⁵.

His 'n' Hers
Research into who uses which tools around the house reveals that men tend to use tools for one-off occasional jobs, whereas women use tools for regular frequent repetitive tasks¹³.

Used by MEN: drill, saw workbench, electric sander, hammer, screwdriver.

Used by WOMEN: stove, carpet sweeper, vacuum cleaner, pressure cooker, iron, electric mixer, washing-machine, sewing-machine, tumble dryer.

Career structures and working hours in most countries assume the worker has no domestic responsibilities. This is why women, though half of the world's adult population, are only a third of the official cash-earning labour force⁴.

Part-timers
Housework, especially that concerned with child-care, prevents many women working full-time.

• In the UK 41% of employed women and 2% of men are working part-time⁴.
• One in 25 woman teachers in the UK and one in 12 woman nurses has had to abandon her career and now works part-time in a cleaning or catering job¹³.
• Women's responsibility for housework prevented them earning $27 billion in overtime payments in the UK in 1987¹⁹.

Love or money
Housework prevents many women putting in the number of hours necessary for promotion in their careers. Women with careers often have to sacrifice their private lives.

• Women professionals in the UK are over three times as likely as men to be unmarried²⁰.

• 50% of top women managers in the US are childless¹⁷.
• Women in the US are three times as likely as men to interrupt their careers in order to take care of children, typically dropping out for 9 years. A 2-to-4-year break depresses earnings by 13%; a 5 year break by 19%¹⁷.

• In 1985 bringing up two children was estimated to cost the average UK woman $88,200 in lost earnings²².