This is one of those cases where I’m not sure it’s sexism. Sometimes it’s tricky to spot sexism because it could just be a problem with an individual and have nothing to do with gender. Still, my story makes me feel discriminated based on the qualities I may possess because I’ve been conditioned to cultivate them as a woman. I’m not a housewife: I go to work part-time and I’m a university student. I’m currently off work to care for our newborn baby, but I still have one class at uni and coursework to do. In a nutshell: I manage our household. If I didn’t dole out the tasks to make things more equal, I’d be doing everything on my own. I’ve spent so much time over the years discussing or arguing about cooking and cleaning, the things that take up so much time in our daily lives. My partner agrees that we need to share the responsibilities at home but doesn’t believe in doing things regularly. He would clean the toilet twice a year and eat a warm meal every day from a cheap snack-bar down the street from us in order to save himself the trouble of doing chores and doesn’t expect me to do the cooking or the cleaning either, so that’s why he’s not discriminating against me based on my gender. But the fact that I do clean the apartment on a regular basis and keep our kitchen stocked with healthy meals means that at the end of the day, I’m running the household on my own. It’s convenient that my partner doesn’t have to feel like a sexist when he eats his dinner at the table I’ve wiped his breakfast crumbs from by telling me that I don’t have to do anything at home if I don’t want to. Because he does see that he needs to share the workload with me, he will clean or prepare a meal (from time to time) but I always have to tell him what to do. In this respect I’m the house manager, organising our home-life on my own and enlisting my partner’s “help” rather than working with him on an equal level. I know that not all men are like this, and that in some cases, the man is the cook and keeps the home clean. Having spoken with others about their partnerships though, I get the feeling a lot of women are doing more than their fair share at home while working outside of the home. Not all men are abusers either, but I’m bringing this up because I think that many partnerships between men and women are tainted by long-standing conditioning of gender roles and that we’ve lost sight of the source of this problem in 2018 where we believe we’re on an equal level and that we’re free to do what we please. My children will grow up seeing their mother running the show at home and even though the world wants to convince them that women and men can share the responsibilities equally. The fact of the matter is, more often than not, we don’t.
