Kristen Gyles | The superwoman syndrome

In 1976, the average American woman was doing roughly 26 hours of housework per week, while the average American man was doing six. Years later, in 2005, the women were doing 17 hours per week while the men did an average of 13.

There’s no denying that home dynamics are changing.

Frank Stafford’s US-based study, which gathered this data, also concluded that having a husband actually creates an extra seven hours of domestic work for women, weekly. Inversely, wives save their husbands about an hour of domestic work per week.

Fast-forward to 2018, the American Time Use Survey showed that women spent two more hours daily on housework than men.

It can be argued that since there is a somewhat natural trade-off between home involvement and a rigid pursuit of career goals, husbands and wives simply allocate the tasks needed to be done in order to keep the home afloat. Except that many homes aren’t floating anymore. They’re halfway to the bottom of the ocean.

I remember as a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed sixth-form student attending the Women’s Conference some time ago. What started out as excitement quickly became thoughtful contemplation when one married professional woman took the stage to present. One of the many things that stuck with me is her outline of what she felt was a growing phenomenon where women were expected to almost constantly be performing the role of ‘superwoman’.

THE DIRTY WORDS

The more time progresses, I see more and more merit in this woman’s perspective. I am going to spend this article highlighting what I, in agreement with her, now see as the Superwoman Syndrome.

Up until a few years ago, there was a tacit expectation for women to engage full-time in homemaking – washing, cooking, cleaning and all the other dirty words women no longer like to hear. This, of course, in addition to general childcare.

I like to look at the progression of home dynamics as representing a sort of Hegelian dialectic where women’s daily occupation is on its way to the sharp antithesis of them becoming the main actors on the professional scene.

However, with the changing times that now see women becoming increasingly competitive within professional sectors, naturally, unless the duties they undertake domestically are lessened at the same rate as their corresponding rise to the occasion in the professional sphere, they will undoubtedly suffer burnout.

To take a second look at the research, household work is in fact becoming more equally shared between husband and wife. But at what rate? Certainly not at the rate at which women are excelling in their careers. At least not within our Jamaican context.

The International Labour Organization (ILO) declared Jamaica as having the greatest percentage (of roughly 60 per cent) of female managers in the world in a 2015 study which included 108 other countries.

However, more than a third of the nation’s children have no father figure, and of those who do, many still live in homes where mom is the ‘active’ parent while dad appears every now and again.

That must mean, then, that women are performing a dual parenting role in many homes.

The result? The birthing of the superwoman who we laud for spreading herself thinner and thinner with each new job promotion, and correspondingly, with each new addition to the family. She is commended for her ability to do it all and to perform the daily balancing act. This has become the new standard.

TRYING TO ACHIEVE BOTH

During the political leadership debates a few months ago, Dr Peter Phillips, in addressing the matter of women’s limited involvement in the political arena, said: “There are many factors that impede women’s participation (in politics). The support for childcare, for example, in the House and Senate is one such factor. The fact that women carry a greater share of household work is also another factor.”

Persons got upset either because of colour blindness or just a sheer unwillingness to digest the findings of easily accessible research.

Women’s professional advancement is without a doubt compromised by personal milestones like marriage and childbearing. Of course, with a resolve to have the best of both worlds, many women break their backs trying to achieve both. And many do. However, it is unsustainable for this to become a social standard for women across all demographics.

Because we have normalised these unrealistic expectations and made them the standard, we have, in many cases, miserable, overworked women, both in the home and in the workplace.

Jennifer Lawless and Richard Foxx, researchers in the US-based 2008 Citizen Political Ambition Panel Study conducted over a seven-year period, concluded: “…women who choose to become top-level professionals de-emphasise a traditional family life and traditional family structures. But when we consider the household division of labour, we see that women who do live with a spouse or partner are nearly seven times more likely than men to be responsible for more of the household tasks and 15 times more likely to shoulder (or to have shouldered) the majority of the childcare responsibilities. Overall, women spend approximately 50 per cent more time each week than men on household work and childcare.”

SHIFT IN OUTLOOK

So does this mean women should abandon their professional lives? Or should they put on their career blinders and stay young, single and unwilling to mingle? We could toss a coin. But I don’t think there is a need to take an absolute position favouring either approach to a less overwhelming life. What is necessary is for a shift in outlook to take place on a societal level. Women are actually not life-sized action figures, and shouldn’t need to be.

If our society disabuses itself of the superwoman syndrome and gives more support to women in their varied life decisions, we may just find that the pressure on women to do it all dissipates.

Not every woman truly wants to do it all. Some desire marriage and babies and might be comfortable with just that. Others dream of getting to be the boss of the team at work. Society should not have either group feeling as though they have missed the mark.

The truth is, the best of both worlds might not be as sustainable as we assume.

- Kristen Gyles is a mathematics educator and actuarial science graduate. Email feedback to kristengyles@gmail.com and columns@gleanerjm.com.