The last few years have been quite unusual for everyone, we all had to face situations we had never faced before. This is true for households as well. When the pandemic hit, suddenly the homes, the living spaces we had been so used to transformed into offices, schools and even playgrounds overnight. Read on to find out what results our #ShareTheLoad campaign produced and how we can all keep it a reality.
Sharing the load during the pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic has rewritten a lot of things in our lives. At the beginning, when people were mostly confined to their households, with no external help, the weight of the household chores fell exclusively on its members. This, thankfully, gave rise to an unprecedented phenomenon.
In earlier years we heavily campaigned for men to take part in household chores, such as washing, to take some of the burden off of women’s shoulders. Due to the pandemic, everyone in the family started taking up tasks, and men was no exception to this. So many chefs were born, and social media was flooded with many firsts – first roti, first experience in sweeping and the first load of laundry. In fact, in a survey 95% of men said they were able to contribute to household chores during the lockdown.
Sharing the load after the pandemic
As the pandemic became our strange reality and countries started to open up all over the world, the new normal brought back some of the old habits. 7 out of 10 women reported that their partners were very helpful during the lockdown, but for some reason, they stopped taking their fair share of the plenty tasks. If men proved they could do household chores when push comes to shove, why don’t they do it every day?
Strangely, the men in question very often grew up in households where they had to do chores. When living together with a hostel mate, flatmate, friends or brothers, 73% of men agreed that they split the tasks equally in the household to ease the burden and help each other. If these men are willing to #ShareTheLoad with another man, what changes when they get married?
Equality is key when it comes to sharing the load
As we tried to get to the bottom of this, we discovered a certain mindset that can be a direct cause of this shift in men’s behavioural change. Most women believe that their partners know how to do certain household chores, but they choose not to do them. If men are able to split tasks equally with other men, but they’re not willing to do it with their partners, it signals that they might have a preconception when it comes to equality. When we asked women, 83% of them felt that their partners don’t see them as equal when it comes to housework.
This is why we launched the fifth instalment of our #ShareTheLoad campaign, with which we strongly urge men to forget this bias on equality. We understand that imagary and representation have a strong effect on our perception, and if we only see women doing household chores in advertisements, it will only strengthen our stereotypes. So, we need to consciously do something together to be able to unwind decades of conditioning and conquer the unconscious bias in our minds.
We want men to understand that equality can be chosen, and should be chosen if we want a happier, more stress-free social environment. We want to remind them that true equality is only possible when domestic chores are shared. Because when we #SeeEqual, we #ShareTheLoad.