I once worked as a brand manager in a tech firm. During a long meeting with an external consultant and a few team members, the consultant requested a tea break as we expected the meeting to go on for a few more hours. What I didn’t expect, however, was that he would request that I make him coffee. It did not escape my notice that I was the only woman in the room. I firmly but politely declined and joked about not knowing how to make coffee anyway, but I quickly realized he was not going to let it go. I redirected his request to a young male intern who was present. His immediate retort was that he wouldn’t ask a man to make him coffee when a woman was present.
I wish I could say that any of this was shocking, but sadly it was not. Many women in the workplace can attest to the expectation that they will assume the domestic roles assigned to their gender over their male counterparts, an extension of the harmful effects of gender stereotypes learned at home ultimately creating a bias in the workplace which usually has negative effects on the professional growth of women.
On the 8th of March this year, millions of women and men around the world celebrated International Women’s Day with the theme focused on ‘Balance for Better’, calling for a better balance globally between the genders not only at home or within their communities but for the good of a thriving economy. In Nigeria, there has been an advent of Women’s Empowerment movements and events heavily focused on the classed demographic of women, encouraging them to balance their life, home, motherhood, marriage and work, the unavoidable hangover from the ‘Lean In’ era. Yet one big part of that conversation which remains ignored is the disproportionate amount of overlooked and often-invisible labor women perform that keeps that so-called balance an unrealistic pipe dream.
Aside from the physical strain of domestic work within the home, the cooking, cleaning, caring for kids or siblings, and even parents, there is also the pre-requisite mental and emotional load, which is generally borne by women alone, even in households where men contribute their share of domestic labor. This means that even in societies where privileged women can offload the burden of unhelpful partners unto domestic help, all the thinking, planning, organizing and typically, the worrying, still falls on the woman and is often not taken into consideration when we measure the factors that keep women lagging behind men economically. Men have started to do more at home, performing better than the previous generation, but research has shown that even in more progressive households, where men believe in sharing the domestic work, women still end up doing 2.5 times more work than their partners.
What is even more alarming is that this toxic labor imbalance seeps into the workplace. More often than not, it falls on women employees to assume more domesticated roles such as event planning, booking, organizing, tidying up, taking notes, and catering for meetings. The recurrent argument is that women are often occupying lower ranking roles or that these tasks are sometimes tied to more women-dominated positions such as receptionists, Human Resources, PR, executive assistants and so on, but it is even more telling that fields that are majorly occupied by women generally command lesser pay grades than those dominated by men, evidence that this sort of labor is inherently undervalued.
However, even when women are in the same higher ranking roles as their male counterparts or occupying male-dominated roles, harmful stereotyping still finds women sometimes being burdened with gendered expectations without acknowledgement of their contributions. I posited this problem to my twitter feed, and was not surprised by the flurry of feedback from women based in varied locations, confirming that they were either expected to or did perform extra (domestic) tasks at work, which were outside of their job description, with no extra compensation or recognition:
“I was at a board meeting. I am a member of the board, but I was expected to serve the refreshments” (Nigeria)
“In my current place of work, my boss decided not to hire any cleaners because there are many young women in the office. We are expected to sweep and mop at COB every day” (Nigeria)
Women can never succeed fully in their careers if they are still expected to take on the major share of domestic duties at home and also take on extra labor at work. While it is encouraging that globally women now make up about 49% of the workforce, and according to the Global Economy Indicator, in 2018 the Nigerian labor force was made up of 45% women, all it means is that women are simply taking on even more work now than ever before. Instead of the constant pressure women are under to juggle multiple responsibilities at the same time without complaining, men must step up and shoulder some of that burden both at home and at work, and relieve women from running on the endless hamster wheel of domestic, mental and emotional labor that ends up contributing heavily to the systemic trap that keeps them burnt out and several steps behind.
It is critical that we heavily scrutinize gendered labor, starting from how we assign chores to our children, to how we divide tasks between boys and girls at school and further down the line, how we reinforce stereotypes by leaning on our female colleagues to perform certain duties. While some women are lucky enough to be in a position to refuse such ludicrous expectations at work and even at home, the rejected, undervalued, and undercompensated labor still ends up falling to other women who are in lower ranking positions or economically disempowered, which keeps women trapped in a cycle of poverty.
While this is a global problem, the weighty role that social and cultural implications play on this issue cannot be ignored. Women are socialized to be nurturing and are considered more valuable when they put their shiny domestic talents on display. Evidently, some women find it difficult to shed this persona while they are at work. This coupled with the natural entitlement to women’s labor that Nigerian men and women are groomed to expect, the cultural bias has an even greater impact on gendered expectations within the Nigerian workspace. If this is something that we want to change, we must all become more conscious and deliberate about resisting gender stereotypes. It is only when we address these issues that we can begin to balance for better and work towards a more equal world for men and women.
