How the Feminisation of Work Could Transform Our World for the Better

Or, at the very least, push back against the devaluation of ‘women’s work’

Image licensed from Shutterstock

We recently moved from a modern flat to an older house and, well, our robot vacuum cleaner wasn’t happy about it.

It still works, sucking up dead skin cells and kitty litter as it navigates its new surroundings, but it now needs quite a bit of help getting around. There are thresholds between rooms and multiple stair sections, including one between platforms on the same floor. There are also areas it simply can’t clean because it’s too big to fit. That’s the thing with smart gadgets. Unless you live in a newly built home or one designed specifically for this kind of technology — a smart house — they aren’t necessarily all that smart.

And although we imagine cleaning to be a simple task, something that ‘anyone’ can do — not coincidentally because it’s primarily women who do it, either for poverty wages or for free — self-operating maid robots like Rosey in The Jetsons are still just a pipe dream.

Today’s cutting-edge technologies might be able to recite all the digits of pi or beat any of us at chess, but they don’t have the same advantages we do. They lack the human hand and foot — multifunctional marvels shaped by hundreds of…