Equality at home - Can this really be achieved?

[marga73]

There is an issue I've been wanting to discuss for a long time. It's the issue of equality inside the house.

Even though women now work and are able to gain respectable positions in the workplace, and we can say that some level of equality has been attained, it seems to me that once they have children, women lose more than men in terms of work opportunities and financial independence. And all because the house and the children still seem to be a "woman's job".

It's all great to find women who are happy being the SAHP, but don't these women feel sometimes that being 100% financially dependent on their husbands is frustrating? Doesn't this situation make them feel trapped and powerless? Is it OK for women to sacrifice their independence for the sake of their children and the house keeping?

I work part-time, and have two small children, and still feel trapped sometimes. I'm grateful in many ways that my husband earns enough so we don't have to worry about paying for mortgage, food, childcare etc - and I contribute to this too - but I feel it's far beyond from the ideal I had when I was young and it really annoys me. If I'm honest, it makes me very angry.

I would like a society where men and women work part time, share domestic tasks 50/50, and look after their children part time, and therefore pay for everything on equal terms. Is this too much to ask in the fierce capitalist society we live today? Am I naive to think that should be the case?

Was, yes. We need to remove those presumption that women any more than men will be at home with their chilren. Plenty of women hate the idea of doing the wretched dull school run every day and are delighted to be in full time work to avoid it and happy that makes it much more likely they are saddled with most of the domestic jobs at home. If you earn 10x your husband you are much less likely to be doing more domestically than he is. Money and power are the key to women's rights not the deification of housework and very low paid menial work.

Porto, wasabi,

I agree with wasabi I don't think subsidising childcare is the answer - it ought to be something that can be paid for out of decent two parent income (with subsidies for those who are not in that situation).

But I do think publicly provided wrap-around care, even if you have to pay full cost price would be valuable.

1. because the state could provide it cheaper than the private sector, because of the unused buildings and facilities, and the ability to build full time jobs which bridge between TA and after school/summer holiday work.

2. because it would be easier to access, reliable, straight forward, not something that is a problem to be solved individually by each family.

3. because it would be more flexible on a pay-as-you-go basis than a nanny/child minder/private nursery - so for example you could use it more if one parent had a business trip.

There would be uproar if people asked doctors to have less pay and give it to nurses so I don't see why it is a sensible suggestion for teachers.

Exotic, I usually agree with you but it's this top-down arrangement of our services that has led to care workers being paid so little - senior staff only take the higher pay because they can, knowing that the care workers are desperate for work and are probably living four to a room and never seeing their own families.

The TAs I know aren't allowed to take their own children to school to look after them - they are forced to hang about outside before school starts (and there are limits to the amount of time they can do that for) or get a childminder while they look after other peoples' children. Teachers know this yet still make the rules to enforce it.

TAs get paid what a grave-digger pays. It's seen as manual labour - yet it was a TA that taught my dd to read, not a teacher. The money has to come from somewhere and it needs to come from senior staff.

xenia I htink you have got it wrong that many women and men don't want to do the boring school run.
They do! They want to be involved in the DC's school life! They want to attend concerts and matches! You may not want to, but most parents do. My DH would bloody love to watch the sports matches every Wednesday and Thursday. Even David Cameron says he tries to do the school run when he can!
But they also want a fullfilling career.

It's that circle that is difficult to square. How do you have a demanding career if you do care about those things?

I will say it once more. Where is the money coming from? I don't think that people understand school budgets. It is so bad that a Head teacher will often have to take a class instead of a supply teacher. This is why they have cover supervisors in secondary schools, they have no money. There is only one way to get it - higher taxes.

We haven't even mentioned the really low paid, school staff who are always women. The lunchtime controllers . Thet work for one and a half hours in the middle of the day. If you couldn't get them DCs would have to be sent home. One of the local schools couldn't recruit the required number. She drew up a rota of days that the DCs would have to go home- the panic this gave brought forth a few people. She could do this because she couldn't ensure safety. Teachers don't do lunchtime duties- they won this right in 1970s and they are not giving it up! TAs are not on duty at lunchtime, many are so local they go home to walk their dog.
While I appreciate all you are saying, and agree with it, I would love you to say where the money comes from- and don't say schools- they need PTAs to provide basics theses days. Even the most careful management can't pay for it.

And I still maintain that it's women being in the workforce that has contributed to another kind of inequality. Two salaries mean people are able to pay more for property (add in low interest rates and interest only mortgages to the equation of course).

It's household income that is the thing that determines how much we are able to pay. As property and rental costs have risen that has resulted in a shift downwards for the blue collar workers and a shift upwards for the white collar families regardless of their gender.

As white collar homes shoot up in value, the lower paid families have no way of keeping up. We may well see lots of men in the caring profession, however they will be as poorly paid as the women and nothing will change in terms of social mobility.

I know that's not got a lot to do with the concept of feminism but another kind of inequality has been created precisely because more women are working. If we suddenly had an influx of 10 million immigrants (approximate number of working women) the same would happen and there would be uproar about that too.

There's a thesis in there somewhere but I haven't got time to write it today cos I'm being too busy caring for others!

I love the school run- you learn a lot and it the best time for a chat. I think the reason Xenia likes the Victorian idea is that she could see her DCs at the end of the day for a quality hour before she does more interesting things!

exotic - can you debate with xenia rather than have a pop at her? personal comments like your above are dull & dont add anything.

I don't think she minds- otherwise she wouldn't do it herself! I am not going to search them out but they are there in plenty.

I am off to work now, but for the debate, which I should be sticking to, can anyone tell me where the money comes from- realistically-other than higher taxes?

It comes from more equal pay exotic or higher tax which then subsidises the poor.

but they would be different people going for the jobs if they were full time with a year round salary ef - instead of having to rely on the pin money workers. there are a lot of people unemployed! there are a lot of people cleaning or supermarket shelf stacking in the evenings and at weekend because they can't afford childcare in the day in order to do anything else - many of those would much rather be working with kids in sociable hours given the choice and would have the skills to do so.

there are a lot of youngsters who want to go into childcare and there would be more jobs there for them to do so and more infrastructure for training and progressing through the ranks of a payscale.

portofino - exactly, it CAN work, there's no reason for it not to except a complete lack of will in this country. everyone is all, yeah but! to everything here instead of ok, lets crack on and change things so that they work.

My last comment-I have to dash. Equal pay in schools comes from the school budget which comes from taxes. We, collectively, pay for schools- no one else. My question is -how do you get the equal pay- from which funds?

i honestly believe it would eventually pay for itself - more jobs, more taxpayers, less people on benefits being paid out, less working tax credits being paid out, less health problems and less social services costs as kids from a younger age are being fed and cared for and educationally supported to head off problems before they arise, etc etc etc.

True swallowedafly but where is the full time salary coming from? Ask supply teachers- they have less work - there is no money. Teachers go on less corses- there is no money.

Courses

A wonderful one for the Chancellor. If governments could sort it we would all be well off, they can't.

look you either give people jobs or benefits. that's what this government can't seem to see and places like france and belgium DO get. so they have great public services, great bin collections, great childcare etc because they pay people to work, they create work that benefits everyone through the services and puts tax in the pot.

this government seems to think you can shred public services and the jobs in it and magically jobs will appear in the private sector meanwhile education gets shitter, our health gets shitter, our support for disabled people and the elderly etc gets shitter and our quality of life plummets and long term we're even less capable of running a sustainable society and economy.

we should have been using this time to make these kind of radical changes to the system and improve things for the future but instead we've just messed it up even more imo so that despite all the high flown rhetoric about making work pay we will see long term massive unemployment and young people never working.

it is not economics that stop these changes happening but lack of political will and short term thinking.

say these schemes run on a 8 to 1 ratio - that potentially means that for every member of staff at minimum wage ballpark pay 8 parents could be working and paying tax so you have their tax plus the tax credits, benefits etc that they are not claiming to pay for that member of staff. the building is already there maintained and paid for and sitting empty so there's no new overhead there. it's literally just the staff.

exotic -

how is it possibly better for the economy/more affordable to train a load of women to be scientists, managers, researchers, designers, engineers, lawyers etc... and then set up these professions so that in effect that they are not compatible with anything but the most restricted view of parenting....so that many women only get to use their skills for 10 years and are then either pushed out of the workforce altogether or employed in low paid work?

It would be more economic not to bother letting women go to university in the first place, if you think that is a good outcome.

now - with mass unemployment and droves of young people without jobs to go to would be the perfect time to do this. but we won't. this country is fucked by it's archaic system and infrastructure and total apathy to moving forwards.

Seriously this 'we can't afford to pay women equally' argument is from the dark ages and economically nonsense.

Its like saying "imagine what a competitive economy Britain would have if we just made it the law that women could only earn minimum wage and were excluded from lots of professions...wouldn't it be great for the economy, it would keep costs down and we could afford to pay for lots of public services" wtf?

Unfortunately though, it is the economic and social model upon which patriarchal capitalism has been built. Like I said earlier, capitalism as we know it only works if you exploit half the population (and that doesn't include foreign workforces).

"imagine what a competitive economy Britain would have if we just made it the law that women could only earn minimum wage and were excluded from lots of professions...wouldn't it be great for the economy, it would keep costs down and we could afford to pay for lots of public services"

Until very recently that was pretty much the reality. The agricultural and industrial revolutions were built on women being unpaid, underpaid and excluded from high paying areas of the work market.

other countries are balancing capitalism with equality and social responsiblity far better than us though.