It is the women who do most of the daily unpaid work required in a household – scrubbing, dusting, cleaning, washing, sweeping. It is also usually the women who take care of the children and babysit, cook and wash their clothes. Added to that is the heavy responsibility of parents and relatives who need help.
The uneven distribution is already visible among boys and girls, and the pattern is the same among older people who no longer work.
The Equality Authority states in its investigation that standards seem to be the clearest explanation for why things are going so slowly.
But the division of labor in the home is not disconnected from how it looks in the rest of society, explains investigator Johan Kaluza.
– We cannot automatically expect that the next generation will make more equal choices. We learn from our parents, we enter a job market that is gender stereotyped.
Relinquish responsibility
He is supported by Lars Einar Engström, psychologist and writer with a focus on gender equality.
– It is enough to look at what it is like in the preschool. The boys get, now as then, help and attention and the girls become helpers.
He thinks that men are very inclined to hand over responsibility for children and households to the women in their vicinity.
– All the time it is passed to a woman – wife, partner, grandmother, grandmother or someone from the outside who gets paid. For example, if the family has cleaning help, it is still the woman who must project it.
More fathers at home
Ida Öun is associate professor of sociology at Umeå University and researches work, family and gender equality. She points out that there are surveys that show that we want change.
– We want equal responsibility for paid and unpaid work. But it doesn’t seem very easy to change.
The norms are firmly rooted, but there are examples that it is possible to do so with concrete measures, points out Johan Kaluza and takes parental leave as an example.
– The research still indicates that fathers seem to take it a little more as a matter of course now to be at home with the children.
Worse health
Ida Öun also highlights parental insurance as an area where it is seen that politics can change the norms.
– How to share the parental insurance shows that it is possible to change. The policy pursued matters.
The report contains proposals to further equalize the take-up of parental leave. Another proposal is a system similar to temporary parental allowance for those who care for a relative. It is not intended as a way to remove the imbalance in the unpaid work, explains Johan Kaluza.
– Rather, it is to smooth out the negative effects that we see that women in particular are affected by. They retire earlier or go down to part-time, or their health deteriorates. It affects the pension very much if you go down to part-time or retire too early.