On-Demand Apps Don’t Get Rid Of Gender Roles.
They Just Make Them Class Ones.
At first glance, the home-services economy seems to be slowly eroding traditional gender roles. Services like Instacart and Munchery are taking on stereotypically feminine household responsibilities like grocery shopping and cooking, which women disproportionately perform. At the same time, technology is helping to outsource man-of-the-house tasks like raking leaves or putting up shelves. This was already true with services like TaskRabbit, but even broader adoption seems inevitable with Amazon’s recent foray into the on-demand home services market and reports that Google will soon do the same. I’ve seen the results among my tech-savvy friend group: groceries from Amazon, meals from Caviar and a fixed leaky faucet courtesy of a Tasker.
So I’ve found myself wondering: If the home services boom continues apace, will we live in a world in which gender roles simply become class roles?
This has already happened in so many smaller ways, from the outsourcing of childcare — and gestation, even! — to house cleaning. The growth of these apps completes the picture: It’s gender equality for the one percent. Not to get too academic on you, but as sociologist Gøsta Esping-Andersen once wrote, “The quest for gender equality tends to produce social inequality as long as it is a middle-class affair.”
Beyond just the class implications, I found myself wondering, what would all it mean for the heterosexual relationships that can afford to opt out of gender roles and in to these luxuries? If it’s no longer a woman’s responsibility to cook dinner and it doesn’t fall to a man to install a light fixture, what does it mean to be a man or a woman?
Maybe that sounds like hyperbole — we define the sexes by more than just the chores they perform at home, right? — but these silly little things are actually fundamental to how we police gender. That’s true even for generally progressive and enlightened sorts: My friend Daniel told me that he would never use an app for a basic home improvement project. That, he said, would be an utter insult to his “manhood.”
He has no problem ordering dinner via GrubHub, though.
It just goes to show the limitations of these modern conveniences. As much as I’m tempted toward utopian feminist visions of households entirely freed from the constraints of gendered expectations, the current reality seems much less romantic. As Lauren wrote, 60 percent of the people who use Alfred, a home-errand app, are female — which suggests that the outsourcing of this work is still highly gendered. An upper-middle-class woman might be able to hand off the laundry or cleaning, but the work of doing so is still largely her responsibility.
Even when it comes to traditionally male tasks, the responsibility for outsourcing tends to fall to women. As the writers of the book Gender, Migration and Domestic Work discovered in 2013, “More often than not, it was women who initiated the organization of handyman work by drawing up lists of tasks needing attention, contacting and selecting appropriate tradesmen, negotiating payments, and overseeing the completion of the various jobs.”
There’s a negative relationship between women’s earnings and time spent on housework: When they make more, they do less housework. Typically, the assumption has been that this is because greater spending power leads to more outsourcing of burdensome lady-tasks. But there’s quite a bit of research showing that the outsourcing of domestic tasks doesn’t actually change the division of labor between men and women. A recent study in Spain found that women who hire domestic help “do about 30 minutes less housework per day than non-hiring women, but in relation to their partners these women continue to do the same share of housework.” (Insert: sad trombone.)
Researchers recently discovered that there is one category of domestic outsourcing that significantly changes the gendered share of work: Gardening and “maintenance services,” which — again, where’s that sad trombone? — are associated with women doing more housework than men. This suggests that men can more effectively buy their way out of gendered household tasks than women.
Superficially, these apps liberate us, but they don’t change gendered expectations in any fundamental way. No surprise there — after all, this change is the result of capitalism, not social activism. Alfred wasn’t invented to free women from domestic labor on principle; it was created because there is money to be made in doing so. Similarly, the availability of Amazon Home Services hasn’t changed my friend Daniel’s ideas about a man’s household responsibilities. There is no on-demand app for “manhood” — yet.
These on-demand apps simply allow some of us to temporarily pay our way out of social expectations. It gives whole new meaning to the idea of “transcending” gender roles. It’s a convenient escape hatch to the ladder of meaningful social change.
To whatever limited degree that these services do allow people to transcend gender, it’s still only available to those who can actually afford it. As Smiley points out, “The invisible work handed off by some women simply becomes visible — oftentimes for other, less wealthy women.” Once again, consider Alfred: Smiley reports that 75 percent of its personal assistants are women. The wealthy and upper-middle class get to pick and choose when traditional gender roles suit them, but not the service workers who take on those gendered tasks.
