Care should be at the center of everyone’s life, not just that of women. This feminist premise so extended to practice does not have the desired application. That they continue to be the ones that take care of the most care is not a perception. The data says so. According to the European Quality of Life Survey, it is women who continue to assume the burden of domestic tasks and also care, whether they work outside the home or not. With the incorporation of women into the labor market in a massive way, they are still the ones who assume the costs of reconciling. A burden that falls more on them if, after becoming mothers, they choose to look for a part-time job or reduce the working day in order to guarantee the care of the children.
The so-called double burden, the sum of paid work and that which is not related to care and domestic chores and their planning, continues to be a matter pending resolution. An important extra job difficult to quantify that is not usually valued either. And this balance (or imbalance) between paid and unpaid work has consequences for them: in mental health and in professional projection. It can also lead to relationship problems.
In times of co-responsibility, they become more involved in care, although not completely. The greatest burden of all this unpaid and invisible work still falls on women. “Men are increasingly assuming more tasks related to the home, but they only stay in the execution part,” warns Maite Egoscozabal, a sociologist and director of Social Research at the Bad Mothers Club. On the contrary, women continue to bear the burden of planning everything related to care. “Even at work they are immersed in this double working day: planning and organizing domestic and family tasks”, laments the sociologist. Egoscozabal defines this double burden as “mental” and “invisible” to society, but she warns that its weight is very easy to accumulate in the backpack of domestic-family tasks “until you explode or anxiety or stress appears.”
There are two types of tasks, they explain from the Malas Madres club, referents in the fight for conciliation and co-responsibility: the mental (or invisible) ones that involve organization and the execution ones, which involve putting the former into practice and which are easier to quantify. Going shopping or taking the children to school would be examples of execution tasks, devising family menus or preparing and anticipating the school organization would be included in planning.
Egoscozabal says that men are increasingly present in domestic chores, but mostly in those of execution and not in the mental ones: those that involve planning and deciding. On the contrary, it is women who bear the “invisible”, those that can be done synchronously with other obligations.
“Men carry out tasks thanks to orders or plans that women have planned,” says Egoscozabal, who assures that in order to talk about the much-animated co-responsibility, all members of the couple must take responsibility for the task from start to finish. Otherwise, “the mental load is not distributed.” And in this, women must also allow this full responsibility.
“Spain presents very high gender inequalities in the domestic-family sphere”, points out Ana Gálvez, professor of social psychology at the UOC, who regrets that women have gradually entered the labor market without there having been a redistribution of family responsibilities . In this sense, she Gálvez regrets that we still work with a separation between the one who generates family income and the one who is in charge of care.
This overload that the vast majority of women continue to bear today has consequences for them. “It seriously impacts their quality of life,” warns Gálvez. “Most of the depressions that women suffer are crossed by gender”, explains the psychologist, as a consequence of the “double and triple shifts” that they have to assume and the “responsibility expectations that they originate”.
But this double burden also has consequences at the labor and economic level. “They occupy 75% of part-time jobs and this impoverishes them,” laments Gálvez. And all of this ends up leading to a “labour penalty”, continues Egoscozabal.
Not surprisingly, 58% of women make work decisions that imply resignation after becoming mothers, according to the study We are a team from the Malas Madres club. A situation that leads women to job insecurity even more so when the “feminized workplaces” are the ones that suffer the most precariousness, says Gálvez. And they are the ones who reject management positions given the incompatibility of managing the two lives.
And to all this, they indicate from Bad Mothers, the emotional cost is added, which supposes the overload of work that can lead to stress problems, in addition to having repercussions on the environment and on the children and even leading to relationship problems due to discussions about the distribution of tasks. The situation, they say from Malas Madres, is even more worrisome in the case of single-parent families due to the lack of support available to them to face conciliation
Putting care at the center and making it the responsibility of all family members is the great challenge facing society. According to UOC sociologist Natàlia Cantó, a bet that does not happen only for dividing up the tasks, but also for giving them the importance they deserve. For Cantó, who rejects the concept of “double burden” and prefers to speak of “gender pattern” and even “devaluation”, the problem with tasks related to care is that they have always been “feminized” and this has meant that they are not give importance to them. “They continue to be fundamental tasks and the fight now is to distribute them,” she points out. Cantó defends the revaluation of tasks that often end up being outsourced and falling on a person, mainly a woman with fewer resources.
For Cantó there is a “radical” class component that advocates “outsourcing so that they do your dirty work” instead of betting on assuming this work at the family level. The sociologist regrets that society is structured under the premise that these tasks do not exist if you want to develop a career and claims that caring is “one of the most important things we will do in life” and that “caring has the importance of life same”.
The setback that the pandemic has brought about in many aspects has also been noted in conciliation. And in this sense there has been one of lime and another of sand. The confinement meant a greater awareness and involvement of men in domestic-family tasks but also the regression of many women from work. The pandemic had a greater psychological impact on women than on men, says Berta Ausín, a psychologist at the Complutense University of Madrid, Berta Ausín, who has verified in the Psi-Covid study that women showed more symptoms of anxiety, depression or feelings of loneliness compared to men during the pandemic.
And they are the ones who, since the covid, have opted more for reducing the working day or opting for measures such as teleworking. “In heterosexual couples during confinement, the man worked locked up in a room while they did it in the living room and with their children,” they ironize from Malas Madres.
And beyond the fact that the task of caring and working is complicated when there are children involved (and it is even more complicated in the case of single parents), the experts recall that a double burden also exists without children because social care has fallen on them . There is always a care relationship that the woman assumes in an unbalanced way, points out Berta Ausín.
“Socially, care must be placed at the center of society and make it one of the relevant issues,” says Berta Ausín, a psychologist from the Complutense University. This expert urges the need for the work of all the agents involved to reverse the situation because it is a social problem. It also considers that the contribution and efforts made by women must be recognized and real reconciliation measures implemented, for which it is essential to integrate gender perspectives, in addition to providing permits as well as economic and emotional support to women who face violence. “double pressure to care and often work full time”. Ausín warns that all this affects the health of women and, consequently, the well-being of boys and girls. She believes it is important to legislate so that advertising, movies or video games, for example, help to “dilute the female role as the sole caregiver.”
More pedagogy is also needed so that children in families do not associate care solely with the female role, the experts consulted request. And it is crucial in couples to agree on how it works: “Agree on responsibilities and fulfill commitments,” says Gálvez. And although there are times when there is a greater overload for one of the parts of the couple, the important thing is that the distribution is “equitable and sustainable”, they point out from Malas Madres. Everything to make visible and claim the important task of caring.
