Adam Smith Institute

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Well done, they've missed the largest working change of the past century

We would not normally look to Julie Bindell quoting Bea Campbell for enlightenment but this is a remarkable glossing over of reality even by their standards:

When it comes to household chores, women’s time cleaning up children’s’ poo and vomit is not so much undervalued as dismissed altogether. But men who stay at home to look after kids, or turn up at the school gates, are seen as selfless gods. These days, after decades of feminism, men do more chores and childcare – but not much more, and still far less than women. According to research by the feminist writer Beatrix Campbell, over the past three decades, the time that men dedicated to childcare rose at a rate of about 30 seconds per day, per year. Their contribution to housework rose at a rate of one minute per day, per year.

This is to entirely miss the greatest change in work over the past century. What both Ha Joon Chang and Hans Roslin referred to as the "washing machine," the stand in for all domestic labour saving technology. 

When we look at how working hours have changed the one that people concentrate upon is the rise of female participation in paid, market, work outside the household. Male such has fallen, male unpaid work inside the household has also fallen. But by far the largest change has been the fall in female, unpaid, household work. 

One estimate that we've seen, quite possibly a little overcooked, says that over the past century the time required to run a household has fallen from 60 hours a week to 15. The childcare part is of course a little different as yes, mothers do still tend to be the primary childcarers, something we don't consider all that odd in a viviparous species.

That is, the biggest change a century of mature capitalism hath wrought in working habits has been to alleviate the drudgery of that traditionally female work. Yet near every vocal feminist we know of declares loudly that capitalism must be overthrown in the name of liberating women. Odd that. Haven't they noticed that this past century has been that very liberation?