Women & Time Poverty | Are you a Gatekeeper?
Women across the world are suffering from ‘time poverty’. In my survey, a large majority of women, irrespective of where they lived, confessed that managing time was the primary challenge holding them back in their careers. Respondents ranked it the third highest challenge after FOMO and Impostor Syndrome.
It’s disconcerting to recognise that some of the time pressure we experience is courtesy of our own self-imposed high standards and expectations. One survey revealed this sobering detail: the majority of women respondents believed that if they did less around the house, they would feel as though they weren’t taking care of it properly. An identical number said the exact same thing about the amount of time and effort they spent parenting. Women still feel that they are going to be held accountable if the housework and the childcare aren’t taken care of flawlessly. In some cases, women may be setting excessive and unattainable standards for themselves related to housekeeping and other family responsibilities. It’s important to highlight the issue of control here. Women are quite sensitive about control, thus they are hesitant to relinquish authority and that in turn results in ‘gatekeeping’. We want to hang on to things and not let go even if that means wreaking havoc in our daily lives.
Home is typically considered a woman’s domain, a place where we can generally set our own standards. Or as Susan Strasser, author of Never Done: A History of American Housework, puts it, home is a “sphere in which some women who have been denied power in other parts of their life have been able to obtain and maintain power.” In the same survey quoted earlier, 28% of married women frequently avoid asking their spouse/partner for help because they don’t believe that their partner would do chores the way they would want them done. Many of the women from my own survey revealed they are hesitant to delegate home chores to their husband or partner as most feel that the tasks would be executed shabbily. Experts call this phenomenon ‘gatekeeping’; women unwittingly prevent a more equal distribution of labour or even block a husband/partner’s attempts to get more involved in housework or childcare.
Gatekeeping is a common phenomenon in Asian culture too wherein women want to be in charge of their domain and don’t want to ‘cede the power to someone else’.
A 1999 Journal of Marriage and Family survey of 622 working mothers found that more than one in five could be classified as gatekeepers: “That group of women performed five more hours of family work every week than their peers did. What’s more, many women refused any opportunity to outsource that work by hiring someone else to do it: 45% of respondents said that they would not hire more household help even if they could afford it.
What’s more alarming is that social media messaging reinforces this concept and often depicts women as inherently better home keepers than men.” “Ads often convey the idea that women are inherently better at household chores than men,” says Erica Scharrer, Professor of Communication at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Back in 2004, Scharrer studied commercials that were on air during a one-week period on primetime television. Of 477 characters depicted completing chores, 305 were women and 159 were men. Among the male characters, 50% were portrayed as comically inept. By contrast, more than 90% of the female characters were portrayed as competent. All household chores are typically portrayed as a source of pride for women.” A blog on Real Simple entitled Why Women Can’t Let Go, noted the aforementioned study and recognised that these types of ads have pervaded the airwaves for so long that they’ve penetrated our subconscious. “That may be the reason why approximately one in three married survey women said they were uncomfortable delegating household chores to their spouse.”
Can you relate? Are you a gatekeeper too? Is gatekeeping robbing you of precious time which could be used to do other soul encriching activities such as self care or spending time with the family? Find out some actionable strategies to deal with time poverty here
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