07 March 2018 
Lynn Killick,
Lynn Killick, PhD research student at Edinburgh Napier University and Director at Sherpa, reflects on the division of labour at home and the impact this has on the working lives of both men and women.
This is the second of two partner blogs in honour of International Women’s Day. In the first, Lynn’s husband Alex Killick discusses gender equality in the workplace.
It’s been a good few years since I made Mr K spit his dinner out during a heated post-work debate about equality by exclaiming that there wouldn’t be equality in the boardroom until there was equality in the bedroom. Now, this was before Fifty Shades, but I’m guessing that might have been the territory that his mind reached first and which induced the choking incident. But sadly no, I was talking about the reality of full time work and parenting; the imbalance in our work loads, or - more specifically - thought loads.
The issue of the imbalance in roles has been captured by the French comic artist EMMA in her comic strip about the gender wars of household chores (Guardian, 26 May 2017). She highlights how although our other halves may be able and happy to help, it still often falls to the woman to ask for this help. She refers to this as the mental load.
Now, I need to stress Mr K is pretty good. In fact, I am more of a stranger to the iron than he is, and I don’t need to ask for ‘help’. But - and it is a big but - it is the thought load that is the real issue. It is the act of organising day-to-day life, vetting and paying for the cleaner and childcare that generally falls to me as the woman (just a few of the 100 things that Mr K doesn’t think about).
Even though in our house we can outsource the domestic chores that we need to, and we have a distribution of responsibilities organised to ensure domestic bliss, I seem to have been lumbered with the bulk of the thought load. To add to this, I’ve also got what I call the expectation load. The expectation from my husband, children, in-laws, from the school, from my friends and parents is that I’m the primary parent, the one that takes a day off when our little one is ill, the one that will organise extra-curricular activities, the one to blame if something is missing from an overnight bag or the sports kit. I’m the working mum, and Mr Big & Important, is, well, just Mr Big & Important.
It is all well and good that our seven-year-old believes that she can take on the world. But as I take on all these tasks and Mr K conveniently gets on with work, we are telling her that if she has children of her own she’ll have to rule the world while also running the house.
The thing is, unequal division of domestic labour, thought load and expectation load is the reason so many women opt out of the workplace. Like many others, I initially jumped off the career ladder, opting not to pursue the top jobs and then moved into self-employment. I’m not alone. According to The Association of Independent Professionals and the Self Employed (IPSE), one in seven of freelancers are working mothers. The number of working mothers working as freelancers increased by 76% between 2008 and 2016. (Interesting, there are no such statistics for ‘working fathers’.)
It doesn’t matter how much we are told to ‘lean in’ or how good the workplace policies are for many the demands of parenting and the expectation that we should be a domestic goddess often holds us back.
So where does this leave us? I’d argue that more needs to be done to ensure that policies and workplace culture supports working parents. In fact, it would be nice to hear more about fathers in the workplace. However, today my proposal isn’t for the nine to five, it is for the 24/7 - and the good news is that it won’t require ten meetings and a new policy to get up and running. It’s cost neutral too.
My proposal to aid gender equality and keep more women in the workplace is that we think about our actions in the home. What can we do to share the thought load and change the expectation load so all parents can fully participate both at work and at home?
