Gender roles: Should men clean?

If you grew up in an African household, you most likely woke up to Mom alarm. This alarm clock was your mother telling you to wake up and clean the house or the smell of an African breakfast prepared by your mom or the Ada (first daughter) of the house. On the other hand, if you grew up with males and had a traditional African father, they were probably assigned or stopped from doing certain household chores.

This upbringing stems from a cultural perspective that assigned gender roles to males and females. Women were often assigned domestic chores while men were assigned handyman ones.

Over the years, I sought answers to understand why gender roles exist. My questions led me to the conclusion that gender roles was a means of protecting women during a time when labor was extremely harsh. Let’s think about it. During the “uncivilized” days, men had to perform tasks like farming, face the wild as hunters, and manual construction. The conditions were harsh which is why the life expectancy of men in those days was low.

To protect women, could this be a reason they were encouraged to take on harmless tasks such as domestic work? Fortunately, in this age of industrialization and STEM, the burden of hard labor has been reduced. This made me wonder if gender roles are still relevant in today's environment.

When it comes to gender roles, I am neutral. This means I have both traditional and modern perspectives on gender roles and gender egalitarianism.

I proudly believe that a husband should be the family's leader (head), protector, and primary provider. This is a divine role bestowed upon men. When it comes to providing for a family, I believe that women should also contribute. This is because we are no longer living in the era when you can get a full cart of groceries for $50 to $100 bucks, or find a decent apartment to rent for under $1000. This is my simple way of illustrating how the cost of living is extremely high using some of a single person’s important expenses. Now imagine the cost of living for a family.

Here's where my traditional values come in. Work life is becoming increasingly stressful for two reasons: poor work-life balance and the level of stress of some career roles which may result in burnout and absenteeism from a family or marriage. Surprisingly, a new study from Forbes reveals that a vast amount of millennial women are returning to traditional roles because of these two reasons.

Employment doesn’t allow for a healthy balance of marriage and family life. Juggling the two will always be hard which is why lots of career women hire nannies/house help. This is a reason meal prep and domestic cleaning industries have grown into billion-dollar industries.

So, why must it be the woman to sacrifice her career for her family? Naturally, women are genetically created to be nurturers while men are called to be hunters, protectors, and providers.

When a woman's profession begins to interfere with her family or marriage life, her maternal (nurturing) instincts will push her to cut back on her career so that she can devote more time to her family and husband. Men experience these feelings but will never respond like women. This is because men are wired to be providers. So, their instinct is automatically on go-getter mode while women easily find peace in digression.

At the beginning of this post, I discussed a childhood moment that was influenced by culture. Most guys in my culture were not raised to handle chores unless they grew up in a modern African home. They may have done modest duties, but they were not raised to do domestic work like heavy cleaning, cooking, and nurturing their children. Instead, they were raised to be providers and perform handymen chores like repair damages around the house, maintain the lawn, change the A/C filters, clear the gutters, take out the trash, and help maintain the ladies' cars.

In our modern culture, it is hard to understand why this is the case, but as I demonstrated, this is mainly motivated by the developing era in which men had to do manual labor and reserve domestic duties for women. Therefore, the conditioning is still effective. The million dollar question is, how did gender roles became divisive or despised? This happened because males abused their power and treated women like slaves. They demanded a lot from their wife yet did not offer to help.

To reclaim women’s’ respect and enthusiasm for domestic responsibilities, men must respect the role by not taking advantage of their wives. Expect your wife to clean the house, but do not expect her to clean up after you. Here is a simple illustration of this. When you make a spill, instead of asking the woman to clean it up, clean it yourself. If you see that the house needs to be vacuumed before your wife’s designated day for cleaning, vacuum. That is one less task that she has to complete. Furthermore, assist your wife wherever possible. If you see that she is stressed because she has not done the majority of the chores that she set out to do, assist her in completing some of them.

I will support my point by presenting a male’s perspective:

“Relationships don’t fall apart because a guy wants to be a good man by helping out with the vacuuming every now and then; they fall apart because the relationship dynamic is wrong. When the dynamic is right, a woman feels good about taking care of her man and taking care of their home, and a man feels good about taking care of his woman by taking care of the household chores that she’s not able to tackle on her own." — Dan Bacon, Relationship Coach

This is true! I do not mind doing domestic work. However, I desire assistance when it is necessary. This desire is not motivated by a rebellion against traditional values. Rather, it stems from a place of exhaustion. Balancing domestic duties and a career is tasking. When able, a man should render some assistance.

Gone are the days when women only served as housewives. Women are attending school and entering the workforce at a high rate. This is because women deserve to be educated and pursue wonderful careers. Another important reason is the cost of living is too much. Unless the man is making a decent six figures or above, one average salary in today’s economy cannot offer financial stability for a family which has been proven by family economists. Therefore, women must have some form of income, whether she is a housewife or a career woman.

To finish, gender roles like housewifery were not designed to harm women. Instead, it was a sort of protection during a period when labor was particularly hazardous due to a lack of modern inventions. Men handled more difficult responsibilities such as protecting the family and working in harsh conditions, but women took on less stressful roles such as cleaning the house, caring for the children, and cooking hunting game that the men earned through farming and hunting.

So, what about raising the kids? Should a man assist in this role? Find out in our next post (coming soon) called Dad’s and Children: The Importance of Fatherhood. Thanks for reading

With love, Jenn 💕