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EU campaign pushes for equality in the home

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european union, housework, women's rightsShould European Union technocrats tell us who should do the washing up?

Damn that pesky European Union. If it isn’t trying to legislate on square bananas it is interfering in our household chores. Or, this is what the mainstream press would have us believe.

Members of the European Parliament recently issued a report stating men should do half of all the housework.

Cue foaming-at-the-mouth outrage in the press.

According to what was reported, this proposal seems heavy-handed at best and ludicrous at worst.

It is difficult to see how the European Union could legislate for domestic duties without installing 1984-esque monitoring devices in the cleaning cupboard.

After all, some may argue that the European Union (EU) as a whole has more urgent issues to content with, such as mass unemployment, or how to deal with the waves of refugees and economic migrants fleeing the Middle East and North Africa.

But despite the maniacal headlines about overzealous EU technocrats dictating our home lives and filling our kitchens with rules, regulations and non-bendy cucumbers, the report on the EU Strategy for equality between women and men post 2015, put forward by the Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality, is actually quite broad with a focus on addressing equal pay.

So what has this got to do with dirty dishes? Well, the section of the original report that has been picked up by the media is as follows:

The Committee ‘stresses the importance of flexible forms of work in allowing women and men to reconcile work and family life, provided the worker is free to make the choice, and instructs the Commission to coordinate and promote exchanges of best practices; stresses in this connection the need for awareness campaigns for the equal division of domestic work and care and nursing.’

That’s it, there. The Committee recommends that the European Commission encourages equal division of labour in the home as best practice.

So we won’t be opening the fridge to see faceless technocrats monitoring our cooking and cleaning habits. We won’t be forced to fill in EU time sheets on who does what in the home. There will be no custodial sentences for men who refuse to do the hovering or change dirty nappies.

But this isn’t just a case of who does the washing up after dinner.

A 2013 study from the European Social Survey showed that in the UK, 70 per cent of all housework is taken on by women, and around two-thirds of all housework is done by women even if they work over 30 hours per week.

Furthermore, many women work part-time after having families. Often the astronomical cost of childcare means many women become ‘stay-at-home mums’ and drop out of the workplace altogether.

In fact, a recent report by Gingerbread and the Child Poverty Action Group states that rising childcare costs are frog-marching families into poverty.

With regards to this, the report recommends that the European Commission ‘draws attention to the fact that, despite the EU funding available, some Member States have made budget cuts that are affecting the availability, quality and costs of childcare services, with the subsequent negative impact on reconciling family and working life, which particularly affects women.’

These are all quite reasonable suggestions that would, if implemented, benefit the economy as a whole.

Given that the woman’s role as housekeeper is so deeply ingrained in our culture perhaps this could go some way towards changing the cultural mindset and bringing gender equality a few steps closer.

Cue foaming-at-the-mouth outrage in the press…

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