Outsourced Housework?

Could a housework benefit crack the glass ceiling for professional women?

The Anita Borg Institute says that offering employees an allowance for cleaning services could help companies retain women in scientific and technical positions, while allowing them to reach their full potential. Caroline Simard, the institute's director of research, points to a study finding that highly productive female scientists are more likely to pay someone else to handle housework.

According to the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University, women scientists married to scientists still tend to do more housework than their partners. The study by Londa Shiebinger and Shannon K. Gilmartin found that

... women scientists in dual-career academic couples still handle 60% of the laundry, 56% of the cooking, and 46% of the cleaning. Male scientists in dual-career couples, by contrast, handle 29% of the laundry, 41% of the cooking, and 31% of the cleaning. Equality on the home front is still an elusive goal. Both men and women academic scientists work about 60 hours a week –except that on top of those 60 hours of work, women are carrying a disproportionate amount of the housework.

Actually, many of us would be thrilled to only do 46 percent of the cleaning. And, doing the math here, if the women in the study did 46 percent of the cleaning and men did 31 percent, are the kids pitching in, or what?

In an interview, Shiebinger says that companies and academic institutions that want to retain women should include a housework benefit along with such things as childcare.

Simard points out that "outsourcing housework" to other women stuck in this low-paying job perpetuates another kind of gender inequity. Shiebinger responds that housecleaning services should also be professionalized, with living wages and benefits.

In fact, the latest figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics found that, for the first time in our history, more women than men were employed outside the home (or farm).

Of course, the problem extends outside of academic and technical professions. In 2009, the Shriver Report, a study by Maria Shriver and the Center for American Progress,  examined how working women have changed our society — and what needs to change to support them. Noting that women are half of all U.S. workers and mothers are the primary breadwinners or co-breadwinners in nearly two-thirds of American families, the report pointed out

… while both men and women want the kind of support that makes it possible to have a dual-earner, dual-caregiver family, these issues are more often misperceived as only "women's issues" in Washington and statehouses around the nation. Men need family-friendly policies so that they can have the sorts of family relationships they say they want to have, as well as careers that enable them to work and live better in our changing 21st-century economy.

The Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology's mission is to support and celebrate women in technical professions. It's a terrific resource for women who are or want to work in any of the sciences or maths-oriented professions; they also have a lot of cool programs for girls.

If you're in Northern California, the Anita Borg Institute and the Clayman Institute are co-sponsoring a free panel discussion on housecleaning benefits.