Rebecca Huntley on the worst of all husbands

Rhianna Keen

This article was published in Living Ethics: issue 82 summer 2010

Rebecca Huntley drew an impressive crowd for her FODI talk about why Australian husbands are the worst in the world and why it is women’s fault. But the hypothesis didn’t stack up for Rhianna Keen.

Despite widespread change in recent decades to women’s involvement in the public sphere and the workforce, the division of unpaid domestic labour and childcare has remained starkly gendered.

Rebecca Huntley shared her views on why this is the case in her talk Australian husbands are the worst in the world and why it is women’s fault. Drawing on 2006 research from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Huntley points out that women spent two hours and fifty-two minutes per day on unpaid housework, and men spent one hour and thirty-seven minutes per day on unpaid housework.

In 2006 women’s time spent on unpaid housework was ten minutes less than in 1992 while men’s time spent on unpaid housework showed no change at all. Huntley also draws on international research conducted by Almudena Sevilla Sanz from Oxford University comparing social attitudes on gender, housework and childcare responsibilities across twelve different countries. In this study Australia was ranked at the bottom of the list which included the USA, Japan and Austria. For Huntley, these findings demonstrate that Australian men have showed little change to their behaviour in recent years compared to their international counterparts.

this view effectively minimises the role
that men play in reproducing an
unequal division of labour

For Huntley, many of the typical reasons offered to explain this lack of change, such as men’s involvement in paid work, biological differences between the sexes, or general laziness fail to adequately explain the persistence of a gendered division of labour. Instead, Huntley proposes that men’s involvement in unpaid domestic labour has remained restricted because women have allowed men to limit their involvement.

In other words, men have maintained their limited involvement in unpaid domestic labour because “women have let them get away with too little for too long.”

According to Huntley, many men felt discouraged from further involvement in domestic labour due to their partners’ reluctance to relax control over the domestic realm.

Meanwhile, women continue to do more housework because they do not trust their partners to carry out domestic tasks adequately or they are uncomfortable asking their male partners to become more involved.

To encourage a more equal division of domestic labour and childcare, Huntley identifies two specific approaches for women in relationships. Firstly, women must “make room for men to do stuff” to encourage men to become more involved.

Secondly, women must feel they have the right to ask their partners for what they want and be willing to confront these issues instead of avoiding them.

Meanwhile, men simply have to “grow up. Stop expecting their wives to be their mothers and clean up after themselves”.

Huntley’s framework may appear to offer a strategy for women struggling to manage competing demands in their homes and workplaces. However, this framework is problematic and its potential for bringing about a more equal division of domestic labour and childcare is minimal.

A key problem lies in attributing responsibility for the unequal division of labour to women who are blamed for failing to challenge their male partners’ meagre involvement. The suggestion that they should negotiate a more equal division of labour and childcare and enforce these ideals in practice effectively puts the onus on women to manage the division of labour in their own households.

Within this context, men are only required to increase their involvement in domestic labour and childcare in response to the demands of their female partners. It serves to reinforce gender assumptions of men as ‘helpers’ in relation to domestic labour and childcare as opposed to domestic managers or primary care-givers.

the unequal division of labour is
equally men’s fault

Furthermore, this view effectively minimises the role that men play in reproducing an unequal division of labour. While Huntley argues that many men feel discouraged from becoming more involved in domestic labour and childcare, this does not mean that men are entirely powerless to challenge current arrangements and take up a greater share of domestic labour and childcare if they truly wanted to. However, there is little evidence from Huntley’s research to suggest that this is occurring.

For this reason, the unequal division of labour is equally men’s’ fault for not taking it upon themselves to take up an equal division of labour. Instead of waiting for their female partners to motivate and encourage men to become more involved in domestic labour and childcare, a more egalitarian and productive approach would require men to ‘fess up to their latent sexism and take responsibility for their involvement.

A more ‘dangerous idea’ would insist that men take it upon themselves to challenge current arrangements and become more involved irrespective of their female partners’ behaviour. An equal division of labour between men and women ultimately requires that men and women are equally held responsible for negotiating and managing domestic labour and childcare within their own households.