From the outside, Sweden looks like the most equal country in the world. What men do, women do as well. The streets of Sweden’s cities are full of both of them; they ride their bikes to work, they push children in strollers, they do groceries, they work in banks and they work in construction.
The premise of gender equality, reflected as it is in the public division of labour, seems to be flourishing here. If there is a place in the world most committed to gender equality, this seems to be it. Even the country’s foreign policy advertises itself as a ‘feminist’ foreign policy, committed to realising the principles of gender equality. Sweden’s international development programmes are thus required to make gender equality the first priority.
But at home, things are a bit different. The equal division of labour that one imagines is the private dimension of gender equality—men and women doing the dishes, purchasing the groceries and performing the million domestic chores that are involved in running a home— are hard to realise even in a country so committed to gender equality. And there is data to back this: according to a recent study published by the European Sociological Review, equality is not the norm in every single relationship.
Even more interestingly, the study finds that relationships in which men discount the domestic work done by their partners and do not share equally in it, reveal greater dissatisfaction with the relationship. In simple terms, husbands who do not do the dishes in Sweden face the highest risk of getting dumped.
Sweden is not alone. Another study from Australia, where (surprise, surprise) men and women do not share the housework, show similar results. With far less government support for realising gender equality in relationships, Australian women (like so many others in the rest of the world) find themselves saddled with hours and hours of extra work once children are born. This fact, the unwillingness of too many men to share in the housework, has been linked to Australia’s very high divorce rate.
The fix to the problem is simple in theory: in couples where both husband and wife work outside the home, they must share the domestic chores or at least responsibility for them. In couples where only one works outside the home, it is absolutely crucial that the person doing all or most of the domestic chores be acknowledged for their share of the work.
In Pakistan, where there is little or no commitment to gender equality, the story is even sadder. Traditional gender roles combined with the pressures of an urbanising society means that women are saddled with both a career and all the responsibility of ensuring that the home runs smoothly. Old but resilient ideas of manhood mean that many men are totally unwilling to share in the housework or even care for the children. Both are easily dismissed as the realm of women; the man will be less of a man if he changes a nappy or if he cleans up the kitchen.
Then again, there are the in-laws, particularly many mothers-in-law, who stand guard, ensuring that the work they did must now be heaped on the new woman in the house. The darling sons of these women never do the dishes and never will do the dishes and very few will thank their wives for doing the work. Unlike the women in Sweden, who can easily choose divorce, Pakistani women saddled with all the dishes and none of the thank-you’s have no recourse but to sigh and bear it.
Some men and their mothers may consider this a victory, but this is not true. As any Pakistani woman knows, a home with such a lopsided power arrangement, where the separate branches of governance, male and female, are not balanced, is not a happy home. Even if it is true that men have always dominated, husbands have always ruled the home, what has been forever is not what can persist forever. As the Swedish and Australian examples show, ultimately such arrangements are weak arrangements, built not on love but on the lack of better options.
Equality in the home, admittedly, is not a priority for most Pakistanis. Even in this moment of incipient political change, where the usual suspects and many others are leveraging their power and hedging their bets, few pause to consider that the imbalances of the public sphere are born of those that are constantly justified in the private sphere.
When people are raised and reared in an environment that is often a tyranny, where power is never evenly distributed and one bossy force controls everything, they remain ill equipped to demand anything more in the public and political spheres. What works at home, everyone assumes, works everywhere else — one side with all the power, everyone else with all the silent hatreds, all the unattended misgivings.
The dishes, then, are a symbol of so much more than simply the dishes; sharing in the work of managing a life together reflects mutual respect rather than absolute fear.
Relationships based on respect, on overcoming differences and sharing power, ones that ensure the happiness of all involved, are the bricks and bones of a truly healthy family. No one wants to do the dishes, but when everyone participates in doing them there is little opportunity for secret hatreds to grow and seethe and simmer.
So it is with everything else; the home is, after all, the microcosm of the state as a whole, easy to rule with fear and intimidation but left vulnerable in its secret resentments. Even if they are silently borne, the weight of these secret grudges weighs the bonds that bind. A lifetime of inequality, of dishes dumped on one person, of power hogged by one side, is a persistent threat to the home and to the whole in which it exists.
