WOMEN WHO TOIL: Unbelievable Stats & Notes on Women's Unpaid Labour.
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📷: Instagram.
"By the time girls grow up, they are estimated to have provided 160 million more hours daily than boys in unpaid labour"- UNICEF.
A woman who has no control over her labour is a woman who has no control of her body, autonomy, time & society. The discourse on women's liberation is viscerally incompletely, in fact, it is irrelevant without addressing issues of unpaid labour because it touches on her autonomy, body and time.
People often relegate Gender Based Violence to acts of physical violence, so when I mention unpaid labour as violence against women, it often comes as suprise to some, others said it is not as serious as physical violence. One once told me feminism should not be brought into the home meaning feminism should be silent on issues of unpaid labour.
It is crystal clear that society has doggedly refused to admit the steep cost of unpaid labour on women.
Society has relegated women to the background where they churn, toil and labour to keep everyone happy while still contributing financially to the running of the house.
Arlie Russell Hochschild with Anne Machung (1989), in their ground breaking book THE SECOND SHIFT describes unpaid labour as a second shift. Men and women go out to work (first shift), and while men return home to rest and recharge, women return to their second shift; while men return home to eat, women return home to cook the food that would be eaten by the men and also prepare themselves to sexually gratify the man at night.
In fact, we have had several women, pastors, celebrities like Veekee James advise exhausted women to just lie down on the bed, spread their legs and allow their husbands to hump on them even if they are too tired to be pleasured.
Instead of reducing the bone crushing burden on her, she is praised for her uncanny ability to do so much with so little resources, help, time and compensation.
But I am not here to glorify women's strength in suffering, neither am I hear to tell women to detach their mind from their bodies and just lie down lifelessly while their husbands & boyfriend hump and thrust on what is remaining of their belaboured body.
I am here to say this is a problem and should and must be addressed on an individual level, family level, corporate level, religious level, governmental level & international level.
If men and women live in a house, if men and women create filth, then men and women should equally be responsible for cleaning that filth.
Shocking stats on women's unpaid labour
✅ Women worldwide lose $10.8 Trillion annually to UNPAID LABOUR.
- OXFAM REPORT.
✅ In 2023, 748 million people (aged 15 or older) were not participating in the global labour force because of care responsibilities, accounting for a third of all working-age persons outside of the labour force. Of these, 708 million were women and 40 million were men.
- International Labour Organisation (ILO).
✅ Globally, around 1.6 billion women and 800 million men are outside the labour force, with 45 per cent of these women and 5 per cent of these men citing care responsibilities as the reason for their non-participation. Among women aged 25 to 54, the proportion citing care as the reason for being outside the workforce rises to two-thirds (379 million women).
- International Labour Organisation (ILO).
✅ 70-75% of unpaid labour is performed by women which is 3/4th of all unpaid labour.
- International Labour Organisation (ILO).
✅ Husbands create at least 7 hours of domestic work per week on women
✅Numerous studies also show that by reason of unpaid labour, Husbands generally get more sleep than women. This is something that the vast majority of us can attest to. Husband wakes by 6 am to prepare only himself for work while mother wakes by 4 am to prepare everyone, cook, clean ,get everyone prepared before preparing herself. Husband sleeps by 9 or 10 to prepare for a new work day, wife sleeps by 12 making preparations for the family.
She is the last to sleep and first to wake up.
✅ A study of 24 sub-Saharan countries revealed that in places with no water piped at home, water collection time per trip is more than 30 minutes. An estimated 3.36 million children and 13.54 million adult females were responsible for water collection in their families.
In Malawi, the UN estimates that women who collected water spent 54 minutes on average, while men spent only 6 minutes. In Guinea and the United Republic of Tanzania average collection times for women were 20 minutes, double that of men (this is dependent on the distance they have to reek to fetch water and they make several trips a day to fill the house.).
- UNICEF, Collecting Water is often a colossal waste of time for women and girls.
✅ By the time girls grow up, they are estimated to have provided 160 million more hours daily than boys in unpaid labour.
✅ Unpaid work could exceed 40 per cent of GDP in some countries.
- United Nations, Invisible Yet Indispensable: Why the World Runs on Women’s Unpaid Care Work.
✅ Globally, women perform 76.2 per cent of total hours of unpaid care work, more than three times as much as men. In Asia and the Pacific, this rises to 80 per cent where women spend as much as 4x on unpaid work.
- International Labour Organisation (ILO)
✅ At the global level, women were found to perform three-quarters (76.2%) of unpaid care work, dedicating an average of 4 hours and 25 minutes per day, compared to men's 1 hour and 23 minutes. This equals to approximately 201 working days per year for women compared to 63 for men.
- United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
✅ Around 62 percent of African women are involved in farming (WIPO), yet women own only around 2% of lands globally.
✅ At the global level, in 2018 it is estimated that that around 16.4 billion hours were devoted to unpaid care work daily, equivalent to 2 billion people working full-time with no pay, or around 25% of the world’s total population.
- International Labour Organisation (ILO)
Notes:
When will we acknowledge the fact that unpaid labour goes beyond mere duty or love towards family and has since entered the realm of VIOLENCE & DAYLIGHT ROBBERY AGAINST WOMEN & GIRLS?
When will we acknowledge the fact that unpaid labour is domestic exploitation of women and girls?
When will we acknowledge the fact that unpaid labour is culturally sanctioned modern day slavery of women and girl?
When will we acknowledge the fact that the world is grossly indebted to women in a magnitude that can never be repaid?
Has the world not taken enough from women and girls already? How much more should we lose before we as individuals, families, nations and the world at large say IT IS ENOUGH!
We grew up hearing that men run the world but in reality, men run the world by robbing women of their labour, payment, time, ideas.
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Turns out wanting to eat only fresh food comes at a steep price.
Turns out not employing professional care for your aged parent and expecting your wife to shoulder the burden comes at a steep price.
Turns out wanting your wife to be a stay at home wife while your career remains unscathed by your decision comes out a steep price.
Turns out holding unto cultural beliefs that excuses you as a man from participating domestically while exploiting the women around you domestically comes at a steep price.
Turns out women do not lose their libido after marriage or childbirth, they are just too exhausted to be pleasured by the same men who had no qualms watching them toil and labour all day, only to grope them at night.
And those who bear the brunt of that steep price are women- wives, mothers and daughters.
We have not even touched the domestic violence aspect of unpaid labour.
✅ Over the years, we have seen cases of men tearing up their wives certificate or secretly sending out resignation letters to their wives' employers in other to force her out of the work force.
✅ We have seen men deliberately sabotage their wives career to force her out of labour. One even publicly boasted about setting his wife's shop on fire because it was thriving very well and he needed to 'humble her'.
✅ There are numerous recorded cases of men beating and even murdering their wives for not cooking, not cooking on time or not cooking delicious meals to their specifications.
UNPAID LABOUR IS VIOLENCE!
Even more disheartening is the fact that we are having this discourse at a time when many men are increasingly abdicating their traditional roles as providers. They do not want to provide for their wives, they say such women are FINANCIAL LIABILITIES & GOLD DIGGERS, yet, YET, they have no problem constituting DOMETIC LIABILITIES to the same women they don't want to provide for.
Radical Approach to Dealing With The Menace Called Unpaid Labour.
Drastic problems call for drastic measures. I have never bought into the idea that discussion is enough to solve women's issues because all these losses we numerated, billions of men are profiting off it and to call for equality is to ask them to give up this unmerited male privilege which we know very few will heed the call even when they are aware of its damning effect on women.
Some ways to address this issues are:-
1. Cultural and religious bias: Cultural norms have taught us that it is natural for women to perform labour. We grew up seeing the image of a pregnant mother who holds a baby in her arm while guiding her eldest child with the assignment. All the while, she is simultaneously cooking and washing plates.
In fact, there is saying that "a woman has 6 hands".
In my secondary school, I remember my Chaplin praising women's uncanny ability to do so much. In his words, a man can only concentrate on doing one thing at a time like reading a newspaper, but a woman can multitask. And then he asked us to clap for women and we did.
Then I thought the mental image of a super mum who does it all was impressive, now I know it is oppressive and society has ruthlessly crossed the line between between oppressive and impressive. In fact, it has rebranded and marketed our oppression back to us impression.
But has it every occured to them that the reason Women are doing so much is because men are doing so little and there is nothing praise worthy about this?
Let's call it what it is- A multi tasking woman is a woman covering up for the domestic lapses of men!
If the husband gave up 30 minutes of his sleep and wakes up by 5:30 instead of 6am to prepare the whole family not just himself, then his wife would not have to wake up by 4 am to do it all alone.
In an equitable arrangement, both of them would only lose 30 minutes of sleep if they both wake up by 5:30. Their synergy will get the work done a lotttt faster. But where he leaves it all to her, she would have to lose 2 hours of sleep by waking up 4am. This is how the sleep gap starts.
In fact, men will rather have their wives give up their whole career and become stay at home mother just because they are unwilling to give up 30 minutes of sleep to care for the family they profess to love.
We don't want to be clapped for while we labour, we don't want to be praised for doing so much, we want the burden take from our backs
Women are not natural multi taskers, women learn to multi task because they had to cover up for the lapses of men!
I can multitask, and it is not because it comes natural to me, it is because while my younger brother slept and I laboured, my mum still found a way to blame me for not doing the work my brother was meant to do. In her words "Even if your brother does not do the dishes, does that mean you wouldn't do it? Is that what you will do in your husband's house? So if your husband does not do his part of the job you wouldn't take the initiative to do it?"
From infanthood, girls are taught to take initiatives and cover up for men's failings. So it only makes sense that woman's multi-tasking will look natural because she has done it repeatedly for years. If men did it too repeatedly, it will look natural to them!
There is nothing natural about a woman cooking, washing, cleaning, it is nurture, she learnt it while her brothers slept. AND MEN TOO CAN AND SHOULD LEARN IT.
2. Inclusive participation: All hands must be on deck. Labour and hygiene knows no gender and women should enforce same on their son's, brothers and husbands!
The long hours spent on unpaid labour are valuable time that could be spent on gainful PAID EMPLOYMENT. Women's unpaid labour have always been the ones funding men's lifestyle.
Like Chinenye Nweke rightly said "...if you're unable to pay a chef to cook for one month because you can't afford it, what it means is that the person cooking your food for free is providing you a lifestyle that you ordinarily cannot afford. Her free labour has you living above your means"
3. Weaponising earning more: Being the spouse who earns more should ordinary NOT entitle you to more rest than your spouse. If a wife works 8-6 and earns 100,000 while her husband works same hours and earns 500,000, that should not entitle him to more rest while she works domestically because earning less does not automatically translate to working less.
In fact, the lower income jobs in our society like house helps, cleaners, farmers tend to do more physically exerting work for lower pay while those in air conditioned office earn more.
Insisting on resting more by reason of you earning more means you are relying on an existing inequality to lend legitimacy to another system of inequality, and buy you higher privileges at your wife's expense!
Women generally earn less than men on a global scale by reason of the fact that men generally marry women younger than them hence have already made significant strides career wise and now earn more, gender pay gap, career breaks during pregnancy and child rearing demands, promotion gap, women been viewed as less competent than their male counterparts with similar qualifications etc. Hence the playing field is already skewed in men's favour.
In fact, even as a practicing lawyer, I had a situation where a faith based organisation were insistent on hiring a female lawyer. When I was recommended to them, I got to realise that the reason they wanted a female lawyer was because they believe women should ordinarily charge less. It didn't matter that I spent same amount of time and money in law school, they assumed women are less competent and deserving of less. They will rather pay a male lawyer my asking price than pay me that sum.
All female dominated works are generally low income works. And this has nothing to do with the lies that 'women choose low paying jobs'. In fact, recent studies shows that the moment women move into male dominated occupations in large numbers (like engineering, tech and other stems), the pay for those jobs begin to declines. This, notwithstanding the fact that women now overtake men in terms of academic qualification. Professional Engineering analysis of the data found more than 70 engineering-related companies in the UK paid men 35% more on average than women.
This is not about women going for lower paying job, it's about a society doggedly insistent on not paying women their money's worth.
Working women earn 75 cent for every dollar a man earns for the same job and this is for White women, the number is lower for Black women, Hispanic women and other marginalised groups.
Society is just so used to receiving free labour from women such that they do not think it is necessarily to pay women at per with men. The US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (As She Then Was) was told by her employer that he wouldn't pay her at per with her male colleagues because she has a husband who also earns.
The point been made is that a man earning more than his working wife should not automatically translate to working less domestically. An existing inequality shouldn't be used as the basis for widening other gender divides or entitling one spouse to higher systems of privileges.
4. Women's Pavlovian response to domestic labour: (I wrote this on my Facebook page, I will paste it here)
Pavlovian response is a psychological study carried out by a man named Pavlov.
It is a study about CONDITIONING, how people can be conditioned to respond to neutral stimuli. The test was carried out on dogs.
For instance, you get a new puppy and the first day you brought it to the house, you used a metal spoon to clank on its plate. Now, that puppy will ordinarily not respond to that sound because it has not learnt to attribute that clanking sound to food.
However, over time, when you repeat it, even if the dog is far away and hears clanking of iron plate, it begins to salivate because it has learnt to attribute that clanking sound to food.
Sometimes, you might even just be washing your metal tray and the dog hears the clanking sound and begins to run because it has now attributed that sound to food. Remember you haven't even said a word.
Another popular example is Catholics running to church when they hear the bell rings. A bell ringing has nothing to do with church, but they've been Pavlov'd (conditioned) to attribute that ringing sound to church time.
That is called the Pavlovian response.
To bring it down to domestic, women have also been Pavlov'd or conditioned to respond to men's needs even without being asked because we are taught to do everything to sell ourselves off as marriageable. This has led many women to just take over the kitchen of any man they encounter instead of sitting and being treated as guests (see image below):
Now that you know, it behoves on you to consciously unlearn those ways we've been conditioned to respond to men's needs by offering free labour. A man can just shout "I am hungry" and the women around will start rushing to cook food even when he didn't name names. That's is why 10 years later he can afford to break up with her and when she says "I suffered with you", he can say "But I never told you to do it. You did it 'by your own free will'" and he will be right technically!
...but this is not freewill, this is conditioning, women been conditioned to render unpaid labour and we have to intentionally unlearn the circle of auditioning for mens approval through unpaid labour.
5. Rest: I have said this again and I will say it again, REST IS REBELLION, doggedly protect your rest, guard it jealously. You are your best advocate.
See my write up on how to rest this Christmas and minimise your workload.
6. Outsource: To the best of your ability, outsource. I said it previously that outsourcing is the 21st century woman's best friend. Cut that veggies in the market, buy already mixed products if you don't have the time, delegate work to others in the house, take time to rest and breathe.
7. The myth of complementarity: Another lie women have been told is that our unpaid labour complements and paid labour. They even use flowery words like "I bring the bread, you make the sandwich. But how is it complementing when one is paid and the other is unpaid?
A feminist once said that if truly your husband genuinely believes that your domestic labour complements his paid labour, ask him to give you 50% of his salary as payment. That would reveal the true state of his mind. Have a binding contract, let him compensate you 50% of his earnings, then both of you can can contribute 50/50 financial.
Then you will know where he stands, you will.know if truly he believes your work is as important as his. Don't buy into modern day sexist rhetorics.
8. Reject inequitable arrangements: For many families, the woman takes care of the cooking, cleaning etc while the men take care of the 'serious' issues like unclogging the toilet and changing car oil.
This is quite a curious arrangement because cooking and child caring is an EVERYDAY AFFAIR that you can't tap out from. However, unclogging the sink or toilet is an event that happens one in 6 months or a year. Changing car oil might be once once every 3 months. Yet men brand it as 'serious' or even 'dangerous' which are terms used to psychologically compensate for the inequality.
This means that traditional feminine chores is performed daily and keeps us tied to the home, working for 4-7 hours daily. On the flip side, traditional masculine chores happens periodic which gives them flexibility of time to pursue their career and hobby.
It would be a mockery to our face to claim that such an arrangement is equitable. If you tell a man, cook and clean everyday while I change car tyres once every 6 months, he will ask you if you're ok. There's no world where MEN will agree to this type of arrangement, so why is this kind of arrangement sold to women as ok and why are women embracing it?
Even in situations where the husband works full time and the wife is a full-time stay at home, it is still no reason to hands off completely on domestic issues. Paid labour is a 9-5 job with holidays, weekends off and sabbaticals. Unpaid labour on the other hand is round the clock!
If a teething infant cries by 2:45am, she must spend half of her rest hour to pacify the child, but if a work mail is sent outside work hours, he can choose not to open it until the next morning at work. So doing a complete hands-off domestically because you are the sole provider is an inequitable arrangements. There should be areas you show up for.
Unpaid labour is repetitive, monotonous, boring, lonely and isolating. It is all round the clock, all day, all year, no sabbatical, no overtime pay, no career growth , no compensation and plenty of under appreciation and being told "you're not doing anything serious. What are you even doing with your time".
Should she decide to find a job after 7 years, she would be told she's too old for the job. She would be asked to provide work experience. The managerial work she did at home for 10 years would count as nothing in the corporate world. And when she speaks against such an arrangement she is told that she must hate her husband and children for complaining. I cannot stress how grossly inequitable such an arrangement is
9. Reject inequitable relationships: Outside inequitable arrangements, reject inequitable relationships in its entirety!
The best gift I gave myself was when I was 19, I told myself "marriage is not a necessity, it is not a do or die affair, it is not a biological need".
This complete mindset shift enabled me to negotiate from a place of strength! I do not feel pressured into settling for inequitable relationships and arrangements just to be a Mrs. I have no intention or business partnering with a man who thinks it is my job to cook and his job to eat.
I have had instances where I said no to all the men interested in me because they do not fit my ideals of what a partner should be. I do not want a leader or a Head, I have a functional head, I want a partner and if I don't find one who meets my ideals, I am more than comfortable being SELF PARTNERED. In fact I've been self partnered for almost my whole life and it is beautiful here.
Someone once told me "If you love him you will happily do it (Unpaid labour) for him" and then I asked her "would a man who loves me be expected to show that love by rendering unpaid labour to me?". She stammered.
So why do women need to put themselves in vulnerable positions to show love to a man?
If a man can afford to show his love without unpaid labour, why should I do so as a woman?
On another occasion, while I spoke about my ideals for what a partner should embody, so done told me "what if he lies about who he truly is in other to trap you?"
I laughed at the use of the word trap because it insinuates that I do not have a walk away option. I told him "His lies is none of my concern so far as he keeps lying till he die, because the moment he shows that other side of him, I will activate my walk away option".
Call it extremism, call it misandry, but I will prioritise my rest above all and any partner who doesn't treat my rest as AN HOLY GRAIL is an enemy within.
With this, we've come to the end of our service. Pls do have a beautiful restful, day and a merry Christmas ahead.
And don't forget to do less this Christmas. Less work means more rest.
Your comments and shares are highly treasure by us 😻 😻. Any topic you want us to talk about, kindly comment.
- Dogo Joy Njeb Esq.
DOGO JOY NJEB Esq is a practicing lawyer and founder of SheResonance Awareness. She has worked with Legal Aid Council Nigeria and is a member of Federation of Female lawyers on Nigeria where she renders pro bono services to indigent persons. She is a private practitioner, a writer and an aspiring author. For any questions, contact her on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, tiktok, x, or send a mail to sheresonance@gmail.com
SheResonance is focused on grassroot activism. We lend our voices to women whose voices are stifled. We break down complex issues of GBV into easily digestible form from a legal perspective. At SheResonance we practices intersectional feminism. If one women is in chains, for her sake the fight should continue. Every story deserves to be heard!
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