Pay your partner!

Didn’t we invent money to give to people when they help us?

In the Gates Foundation yearly letter, Melinda Gates discussed the OECD international survey of the male-female household chore ratio. Women won decisively on all continents.

It’s disheartening. I make breakfast, sweep up, do the dishes. Yet every year, this ratio comes out and dudes just get annihilated. Women manage to do between 45 minutes (north america) and 5 hours (middle east/north Africa) more housework every day. Several thousand years running. Since the invention of houses.

Women are beating us by margins that make a dude’s 10% advantage in the 100m dash look laughable, and that’s before even taking into account that sprinting is an occasional leisure pastime engaged in by choice rather than an imposed survival necessity.

Worse, digging into the survey shows that the chore numbers are a patronizing low-ball number. Some of the activities classified by the survey as leisure (e.g., “time on the internet”) probably include things like the time my partner takes to read through my Medium posts to make sure they’re useful and not patronizing mansplaination. Drat! Women are going to dominate in the emotional labor category again this year also.

Gates does an exceptional job of discussing the how this pattern creates time-poverty for women, making it even more difficult to rise out of money-poverty because they have less left-over labor available to actually sell. The only disheartening part of the article for me was this:

In the end, the goal is to change what we think of as normal — and not thinking it’s funny or weird when a man puts on an apron, picks up his kids from school, or leaves a cute note in his son’s lunchbox.

This advice is what my own partner calls “try harder advice.” It’s the sort of advice that is tautologically correct, rather than usefully correct. Examples: “You are overweight because you eat too much and don’t exercise enough. You ought to eat less and exercise more!”, and “If you spent less time reading shit on the internet you’d have more time to do other things.”

This advice is not helpful to those of us getting shelled in the chore wars! We know! If the allocation of cultural responsibility was more equitable than the division of labor would be also! But it’s not! THAT’S THE PROBLEM!

I hate losing! And so I started paying my partner.

The Gates letter’s central argument is that people, especially poor women need more time. They need technologies and cultural systems that enable them to have more hours to devote to learning, earning money, and leisure, and these hours ought to come out of the time currently devoted to unpaid labor.

But while the letter is entirely about the injustice of unpaid work, it somehow studiously avoids mentioning that when someone does labor, we usually pay them. There’s nothing impossible about paying people for household labor. Rich people have maids, butlers, cooks, and nannies. Poor women aren’t mopping the bathroom because it’s their one true passion.

Doing unpaid housework is really hard. But, luckily paying for labor is easy! Especially when you’re a man, and you have an extra 23% more money. And fortunately for the scoreboard at the top of the article, transforming some of women’s unpaid labor into paid labor counts just the same as doing extra housework yourself! Also, by establishing a concrete price for household labor I have a strong incentive to do more of that labor to control costs.

Almost like money was invented for the purpose of transferring value!

Caveats: My partner and I try to share relatively equal amounts of housework, and we both have careers that pay us. We have a relationship where negotiation about money is a relatively low-stress activity. We both are obsessed with #value. We don’t directly share finances, but do split bills and living expenses.

I often have the experience that my partner is better at housework than me. She understands how to set up efficient systems for getting it done, and spends extra time and effort trying to transfer some of those skills to me. All of those things make me feel cared for, and I value them.

We also have a long running arrangement where our leases didn’t quite overlap, and so we rent her apartment on AirBnB and live in mine. She pays me a small share of the money she makes doing that instead of paying rent.

I couldn’t work out why the lease situation was one that should involve exchange of money but the housework wasn’t.

So I offered to pay my partner for her skilled labor. Economically speaking, we were ideally situated to work out an appropriate price. Emotionally speaking, she asked for less than my initial offer because it made her feel weird. We both agreed to renegotiate our mutual wages whenever our circumstances change. Eventually we just took the average extra 20 hours per month a North American woman works and multiplied it by my partner’s hourly wage. #markets!

This worked for us because we have similar goals and beliefs about money. Neither of us felt controlled or manipulated. We don’t have internalized, middle-class, discomfort about acknowledging that money is an important factor in one’s life.

I’m still trying to win the housework competition, but by paying to cancel out the cultural inequity, now I’m competing on a more even playing field. I’m not paying to avoid chores or to have more leisure time, but I do hope to allow my partner to have that choice.

The Gates letter convinced me that these things were worth a few bucks.

What’s weird to me about Gates Foundation letter is that it assumes monetary relationships are fixed, but cultural ones are fluid. The letter is written as if time and labor are the only currencies we have available to correct cultural imbalances. This gives the impression that it’s easier to revise gender roles than it is to transfer wealth. That is exactly the opposite of my experience. Enlightened folks with good hearts often maintain unjust habits because there’s no compelling incentive to change. Cajoling them to do better typically gets them to shift their behavior just enough to avoid being annoyed.

Writing checks is easier for me than going back in time and being raised in a culture that taught me how to clean. I suspect it’s probably easier for policy makers too, who are more likely to have accounts payable departments than a time-turner.

Paying women for the extra labor imposed on them by patriarchy isn’t going to magically correct gender inequity. There’s a troubling, impacted history that’s going to take many generations to rewrite. But it seems like it’s more defensible than not-paying.

If I can’t even bring myself to pay for the difference in male-female housework winning the north-american unpaid labor competition is hopeless.