To find it unacceptable that society in general expects women to do most domestic tasks

[nonaomi]

I still think most men and women think that women are responsible for 'housework'. It's often joked about how men are 'messy' and 'useless'..and lots of women I know, don't seem to mind this role.

Is this just in my circle, or is that other's experience too ?

I'm 48, so can't speak on behalf of younger generations. But amongst me and my circle of friends, women do most of the domestic drudgery as well as work. For me personally, I just felt the piss was being taken by my former partner and I got so angry that it wore me down and made me bitter. All I can do now is to try to bring my son and daughter up to do an equal share of chores... Can't imagine wanting to live with any man I might date in the future. I hope things are and will be different for younger mumsnetters.

@toomuchtooold Good on you for giving those talks! I'm sure you made a real difference to the people who got to hear them. My fantasy is that I get invited back to give a careers talk at my old private girls school and give the whole talk about how to factor future lifestyle choices into your career choices, how to save money to give yourself choices in the future, and how to avoid deriving your self-esteem solely from work. I made that mistake for a while as a "professional musician" - thinking that if I enjoyed it, it was necessarily a superior choice to make it my career rather than a serious hobby.

I only have very small children now, but in the future if they say they want to be a doctor for example, I am going to be very careful to impress upon them the full range of medical careers and the different financial options (training debt Vs pay) and the different lifestyle options (junior doctor hours Vs dentist or physio office hours Vs nurse shifts). It was never laid out for me when I was young, and one was supposed to choose solely based on "passion" and alleged prestige. Me and Mr Green taking a step back and looking at our lives and saying, "Wait, we will be much happier if we don't have to commute or work weekends because money can't buy you more than 24hra a day," has really improved our QOL. We can't afford to eat out or go to Disneyland, but we have savings and we're both around as much as possible for our kids (bearing in mind that we as a unit do still have to earn some money!) and don't run our lives for the benefit of our employers (as opposed to offering a fair day's work for a fair day's wage).

I'm a huge disappointment to my parents because I don't have a career so they can't bask in reflected prestige, but I feel like we as a family actually have work/life balance that isn't life being squeezed out of what time and energy our work permits us. (Funny how "work" always goes first in work/life balance...) Roll on UBI!

@PerspicaciousGreen I would totally come with you to do those talks! I felt as if I really missed out on a lot of stuff that was really important to me in a career, but nobody really talked about: it was, as you say, all about "follow your dreams". I was too far down Maslow's hierarchy to have dreams of self-actualisation through a career, I really needed something that would give me a decent, stable salary and the chance to have my own place and have a bit of peace. And that was well within my capabilities. But nobody really helped me figure out what jobs would give me that. It was all "do you like working with the public", "are you more technical or more people-focused" and all this stuff.

I wondered whether you might get better careers advice if you went to a better school. But the uni careers service was the same! It was really difficult to say to them, I'll do anything that will allow me to buy a 1 bedroom flat and they won't make me redundant . I think it was probably more to do with knowing people in different jobs and having a better understanding based on that. My mum was a dinner lady and my dad a storeman. It was a very different life for them.

UBI would be amazing. There was a vote on it in Switzerland a couple of years ago. I'm a naturalised Swiss, so I got to vote on it. I voted for it . It lost 40%/60% sadly, but it was a smaller margin than I expected. Its time is coming!

[quote Evelight]@lazylinguist "But... overall he works absolutely miles harder than me, has much less free time and much more pressure and stress than me"

That exactly is what I am trying to say- the current system we have of work being divided based on gender stereotypes is harmful and unfair to both women and men.

Men however, are not financially penalized by it. Women are.

The circles thing is bothering me too, most people's "circles" where you could claim to reasonably have a close knowledge of who does how much cleaning/cooking are like 4-5 other families/households at most (their parents, siblings, best friend(s), and maybe a couple of colleagues), why are people authoritatively presenting from their "circle" as if it's a representative sample of the whole population?[/quote]
It's interesting to read this comment in context of the overtime thread.

I forced my husband to choose between his old job and staying with me and having kids, because fuck me, it was not worth staying with the overworked shell of a man he was. (FYI, for anyone who thinks I'm a monster, he left for a new job with flexitime and is very happy with my ultimatum pushing him to it!)

And before, yes, I did more housework and resented it. But because my hours were max 37.5 and his were regularly 70+, it made sense. But I haven't had to ask him a single time to bring the load up to 50:50.

But why do we flog half the workforce through high-pressure jobs with lots of overtime rather than a 30h week for more employees paying a functional wage?