Diary of a day during the Covid-19 pandemic from a gender perspective

I would like to start this with a quote: “Our beliefs about gender are really strong and sticky.”- Joanna Pepin, sociologist.

There is almost a universal support for women to pursue careers in politics, and attitudes towards gender identity are more acceptable. But, when it comes to the house front, traditional norms prevail. I decided to ask my grandfather what he thought was the ideal arrangement in the house, and he favored one where the father works full time (with pay) and the mother stays at home (for free). Younger heterosexual couples are not more likely to divide the chores around the house, than older couples are. There is a social pressure towards women to have a clean house, and the expectations are different for men, (and no, it’s not true that women notice the mess more than men do). As I was observing, men don’t do as much work around the house as women do. Men walk around the room and don’t seem to
see dust bunnies around the floor, or piles of clothes on the bed.

Women spend approximately one hour and twenty minutes cooking, cleaning and laundring. Around one third of that time is spent cleaning. Chores women do are usually inside, like cleaning and cooking. For a woman, everything around the house had to do with cleaning, taking care of the kids, setting up the table, washing the dishes etc. If these tasks were to be divided, they would be happier. Work men do are usually done outside the house, like car maintenance and working in the garden. Looking at it from my father’s perspective, he says that he would support his wife if they had to partly work, because it would make him happy to share the economic and domestic burden.

During the day I decided to make a mess, leave the dirty dishes on the counter, leave the clothes all over. The first thing I wanted to know was whether men and women appreciated and viewed the rooms differently.

Despite traditional beliefs, they saw the same mess: they appreciated the clean and the messy room the same way. So, if “vile blindness” is not to blame, why do women do more house chores? An argument is that the social expectations are different for men and women. Women can be judged harshly if their house is dirty or not, and their awareness pushes them to do more.

Naturally, if more time is spent doing chores, there is less time for them to spend on other activities such as sleeping, working and having free time. The word “help” means that the work around the house is a woman’s responsibility, and when the man helps he is seen as nice or generous.

Being a stay at home parent does not mean being a slave 24h a day for the family. Just because you’re at home, doesn’t make you responsible for everything that happens inside the house.

If your partner does a load of laundry or mops the floor, they are not “helping” with your workload, they’re doing their part.

“Maybe something’s got to give — and since it shouldn’t be workplace equality or happy relationships, it’s going to have to be the dusting”.

This article was written by Edita Bujupi, a student in the Department of Social Work in UP under the monitoring of professor Vjollca Krasniqi within the cooperation with SIT. This article was written within the project “Men and Boys as Partners in Promoting Gender Equality and the Prevention of Youth Extremism and Violence in the Balkans”, implemented by CARE International Balkans in partnership with SIT and YMCA in Kosovo and supported by Austrian Development Agency, and Oak Foundation.