At work as at home, men reap the benefits of women’s “invisible labor”
This is an issue that reveals the ugly truth about sexism as a norm that affects all women in adverse ways on a daily basis. One that men benefit from - even men like myself, who generally have good intentions and recognize that sexism is an urgent, systemic issue.
For these gendered patterns and norms are absolutely ingrained into us from the day we're born, by our parents, our peers, our relatives, our media, and our culture in general. And oftentimes, it's not even intentional. It's just the assumed, "default" position...which in many ways, is more pervasive and insidious than conscious misogyny.
Men today do a higher share of chores and household work than any generation of men before them. Yet working women, especially working mothers, continue to do significantly more.
On any given day, one fifth of men in the US, compared to almost half of all women do some form of housework. Each week, according to Pew, mothers spend nearly twice as long as fathers doing unpaid domestic work. But while it’s important to address inequality at home, it’s equally critical to acknowledge the way these problems extend into the workplace. Women’s emotional labor—which can involve everything from tending to others’ feelings to managing family dynamics to writing thank-you notes—is a big issue that’s rarely discussed.
In the early 1980s, University of California, Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild coined the term “emotional labor” in her book The Managed Heart. Hochschild observed that women make up the majority of service workers—flight attendants, food service workers, customer service reps—as well as the majority of of child-care and elder-care providers. All of these positions require emotional effort, from smiling on demand to prioritizing the happiness of the customer over one’s own feelings.
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A 2005 study conducted by Madeline Heilman, a New York University psychologist, found that a woman who stayed at work late and offered help to a coworker was ranked 14% less favorably than a man doing the same thing. If she declined to help, she was rated 12% lower than a male peer who did the same. Additionally, Heilman found that women’s assistance usually happens in small, unseen ways, whereas male help tended to be more visible and public. Adding injury to insult, the study found that work performed by women wasn’t only less visible, it was more consuming.
This is an inherently sexist dynamic, and—for women of color—an implicitly racist one. Professional black and Hispanic women, subjected to a sort of double jeopardy in corporate situations, report being regularly mistaken for cleaning ladies and janitors.
The time women spend on these necessary but unrecognized chores taxes their energy, undermines their workplace authority, and reduces the time they could be spending on more socially and professionally recognized and valued work.
http://qz.com/599999/at-work-as-at-home-men-reap-the-benefits-of-womens-invisible-labor/
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