#ChoreChallenge or how to make housework equitable

Earlier this year, Soraya Chemaly, Ishita Srivastava and Laura Bates invited us to take part in #ChoreChallenge. To do this, households first keep track of all chores and then gender-swap them, to eliminate the gender chore gap. I guess this makes it more about heterosexual monogamous couples but I imagine there would chore gaps in same-sex couples and other types of relationship (although they may not directly stem from gender roles as much). There are writeups about it in The Guardian and The F Bomb that I recommend for more background.

My partner and I can’t participate in the challenge because we split chores differently. Here’s the logic we used to come up with our system, in case this is useful to anyone:

• We both have the same ability/opportunity to contribute to chores (this is not true of everyone).
• Therefore we should spend equal amounts of time doing chores.
• There are very well-documented forces that work against hetero cohabiting couples actually having an equitable household with men overestimating how much housework they do (or deliberately sabotaging their chores), women feeling like it’s always ultimately up to them etc.
• We are not special snowflakes.
• And of course the consequences of fucking up are pretty bad.

Thinking about these constraints, we had our tacos moment: why don’t we just time how much we spend on chores to make sure it’s the same?

This system has costs. You have to find a way to track chore time (there are plenty of apps). You have to remember to time yourself (easier for some than others). You have to regularly look at who’s doing more or less. Most importantly, you have to decide what counts as a chore. This wasn’t as simple as it might look to someone who hasn’t done this explicitly. A lot of important work is not traditionally classified as housework. Why, it’s almost like this isn’t random. Here’s what we count as “chores” for purposes of time equity:

1. Tidying
2. Cleaning, wiping, mopping
3. Doing the washing
4. Hanging up, taking down & putting away clothes
5. Ironing
6. Vacuuming
7. Taking out the rubbish
8. Planning meals
9. Grocery shopping & cooking
10. Household decorating
11. Mending or fixing stuff
12. Bills, utilities etc
13. Driving
14. Dealing with government/telcos/ISPs etc on behalf of the household (ie. any time you have to call up and be put on hold)
15. Anything to do with managing Important Documents
16. Car cleaning & maintenance
17. Organising car insurance, registration, servicing
18. Household budgeting, banking, finance, insurance etc
19. Organising social things (including family obligations)
20. Picking, buying & wrapping presents, writing cards etc
21. Researching & organising household purchases (furniture, appliances, services)
22. Research & organising shared travel/holidays

This system prioritises making chore time equal over making any particular chore equal. This is why it doesn’t really make sense for us to “swap” chores. It was weird to see some studies refer to a specific chore (eg. laundry) in isolation.

If you have kids you’re probably laughing at how quaint this list is. Of course for a household with kids, the chores they generate would dwarf all on that list put together. But if anything, this highlights how important it is to have some system. It’s very easy to see how couples who might consider their household egalitarian get thrown right back into the gender roles when hit with the huge extra workload that kids bring.

The most challenging part was slowly working out what counts as a chore. Now, you may disagree with counting some of the above as chores, but this is where a lot of the gendered nature of social expectations makes itself known. Two that I’d like to justify further are driving and planning holidays, which touch on slightly different gender expectations.

From the gender stereotype, a man is more likely to want to drive, which stems from a perception of being “responsible for” the family. Of course, to explicitly see it that way is pretty controlling, but people can be influenced by these assumptions very implicitly. To us driving is a chore because it’s work. It requires a lot more concentration, physical action, responsibility and emotional work than being a passenger and people get paid to do it outside of the home. If emotional labour counts as chores (which it should and does), driving is the flips side of that. Emotional labour doesn’t typically get seen as chores because of the tacit expectations that a woman should “naturally” be empathetic and nurturing which gets used as an excuse to not count that as work. For driving, toxic masculinity is a contributing factor but it’s men’s work that would normally not get counted in this case.

On planning holidays, this is something many people really love, so why would it count as a chore? The problem with associating chores with something you have to not like is that someone’s reaction to a task has to do with their personality, their role in society and what they’ve been raised to think about the task. It doesn’t have to relate to the intrinsic necessity of the task. This is why the “do what you love” mantra is so damaging to industrial relations. On the home front, if women are supposed to “love” looking after children should this stop counting as work? Should ironing be written off as a labour of love because you might enjoy smell of freshly-ironed clothes? Applying this consistently, something like travel planning should count as valuable work that the other partner derives benefit from, feelings and preferences be damned.

We’ve been trying this system for three years so it wasn’t instant, and we’ve gotten better. It’s not perfect but it’s not too bad. When contributions are quantified, it forces both of us to value them. If anything, it’s made me like doing chores a lot more: it feels rewarding to earn “credit” that can be “spent” in later weeks when I’m more busy. We don’t have the stereotypical “you don’t do enough around the house” disagreements. If anything I’ve sometimes felt the opposite, which might show that there’s still a “men have a higher tolerance for mess” dynamic going on. But hey, imperfect players in an imperfect system, right? And of course even in a relationship where the gender dynamics don’t come into play as much (eg. a same-sex couple where both people were brought up with similar gender expectations), there may still be other kinds of inequality that could show up in chores if chips are allowed to fall wherever.

To see the value of a strict 50-50 split like this, it might help if you know a bit about programming. One of the things people have trouble with when they’re learning to code is that unlike most other human pursuits, you have to be 100% precise in what you’re trying to say. There’s no hand-waving and you can’t solve a problem by waffling or by trying to fix it only cosmetically. To succeed in writing code you have to really internalise that nothing gets magically done, ever. And any chore system which strays from a split means that the partner who does less than 50% starts to think that things magically get done.

Just kidding — that last paragraph was me trolling you, dear reader. See, if you’re a hetero woman you almost certainly don’t need any analogies to understand what’s statistically likely to be happening in your relationship. So if you found yourself nodding along, then you might just be a hetero man in a relationship. In which case you don’t actually need any analogies like programming or any other special insight. The call is coming from inside the house: you already have someone in your life who probably has all the insight about the situation that you’d ever need. You could just…ask your partner (or listen to what she might already be saying).