The Moment of Lift

by Melinda Gates

  That is hugely significant because it is paid work that elevates women toward equality with men and gives them power and independence. That’s why the gender imbalance in unpaid work is so significant: The unpaid work a woman does in the home is a barrier to the activities that can advance her—getting more education, earning outside income, meeting with other women, becoming politically active. Unequal unpaid work blocks a woman’s path to empowerment.

  Of course, there are some categories of unpaid work that can make life deeply meaningful, including caring for family members. But it’s saying nothing against the meaning and value of caregiving to say that it helps all family members—those giving care and those taken care of—when these duties are shared.

  In January of 2014, I went with my daughter Jenn to do a homestay with a family in Tanzania—in Mbuyuni, a village just east of Arusha, near Mt. Kilimanjaro.

  It was the first overnight visit I did where I stayed with a family in their home, and I was hoping to gain an understanding of people’s lives that wasn’t available in the books and reports I read, or even in the frank conversations I had with women I met when I traveled.

  I was thrilled to be doing this homestay with Jenn, who was 17 years old and in her last year of high school. From the time my children were very young, I’ve wanted to expose them to the world—not just so they would give back to the people they meet, but so they would connect with them. If there is any meaning in life greater than connecting with other human beings, I haven’t found it.

  I’ve since also done a homestay with my son, Rory, in Malawi, where a loving couple, Chrissy and Gawanani, and their children took us in for several days. Gawanani taught Rory how to pluck a rooster for dinner. Then he showed Rory the livestock and said, “That pig right there represents my son’s education.” Rory saw that the way people save for their kids’ education differs across cultures, but the drive to help your child flourish is the same.

  Phoebe, our youngest, has volunteered in schools and hospitals in East Africa and has her eye on a future that might have her spending a lot of time living in Africa. I hope the exposure to other people and places shapes what the kids do, but even more I want it to shape who they are. I want them to see that in the universal human desire to be happy, to develop our gifts, to contribute to others, to love and be loved—we’re all the same. Nobody is any better than anybody else, and no one’s happiness or human dignity matters more than anyone else’s.

  That’s a lesson that rang out during Jenn’s and my Tanzanian stay with Anna and Sanare, a Maasai couple who lived in a small family compound they had built over the years. They put us up in what had originally been a goat hut. Anna and Sanare had taken over the goat hut when they were married. Later, they built a larger home and moved to another room, and the goats reclaimed their space. But when Jenn and I moved in, the goats moved out for a few days (at least when we kept the door closed!). I learned more during that homestay than I had learned on any previous foundation trip. I especially learned about the burdens a woman carries to make the home and farm run.

  Sanare went off in the morning and worked their family’s small commercial stall, an hour’s walk away along a main road. He usually went there on foot, though sometimes he got a motorcycle ride from his neighbor. Anna stayed home and worked the house and farm, and Jenn and I were able to help her with the household chores and activities.

  I’d been traveling to poor communities since we started our foundation, and I was never surprised to see women doing all the cooking, cleaning, and caregiving. But I had never felt the full weight of their days—what they were doing from the moment they woke before dawn to the hour they went to bed long after dark.

  Jenn and I went with Anna to chop firewood, using dull machetes on gnarly wood stalks. We walked thirty minutes to fetch water and carried it back in buckets on our heads. We used the wood to build the fire and boiled the water to make tea, then started preparing the food—fetching eggs, sorting beans, prepping potatoes—and cooking it over the flame. The whole family ate dinner together, and we joined the women doing the dishes afterward, all together, at ten at night in the dust of the compound’s courtyard. Anna was in motion for seventeen hours a day. The number of hours and the intensity of the labor were a revelation to me. I didn’t learn about it in a book. I felt it in my body. I could see that Anna and Sanare had a loving relationship and worked hard to make it equal. Still, Anna and the other women in her village were struggling under a massive burden of unpaid labor that was unevenly distributed between men and women. It wasn’t just that it affected women’s lives; it darkened their futures.

  I talked to Anna while we cooked on a fire in her kitchen, and I asked her what she would do if she had more time. She told me she dreamed of starting her own business, raising a new breed of chicken and selling the eggs in Arusha, an hour and a half’s drive away. The income would change their lives, but it was just a dream. Anna had no time to run a business; she spent all her time helping her family get through the day.

  I also got a chance to talk to Sanare. He told me he and Anna were worried about their daughter, Grace, who had not passed her test to go to a government-funded secondary school. Grace had one more chance to take the test. If she didn’t pass it the second time, her only choice would be a private boarding school, which would be very expensive. If Sanare and Anna could not come up with the money, Grace would lose her chance for a better life.

  “I’m worried my daughter’s life will be like my wife’s,” he told me. “If Grace doesn’t go to school, she’ll stay at home and start spending her time with other girls who have not gone to school. The families will start marrying out the girls, and all her hopes for her life will fade away.”

  It was an especially complicated situation for Sanare and Anna because their son Penda did pass the test to go to a government school, which is not free but is relatively cheap. So his schooling was assured while Grace’s was in doubt.

  Penda and Grace are twins. They’re in the same year in school. They’re both bright. But Grace does more work around the house than Penda does. When Grace is doing chores, Penda has time to study.

  One night when Jenn came walking out of our hut wearing her headlamp, Grace ran up to her and asked, “Can I have your headlamp when you leave so I can study at night after my chores are done?”

  Grace was a very shy girl, just 13 years old. But she was bold enough to ask Jenn for the headlamp as a gift. That’s how much it mattered to her.

  There are millions of girls like Grace, and their extra share of unpaid work could make the difference between a bright and flourishing life and a life of cooking and cleaning and never having time to learn and grow.

  When I came back from Tanzania, I could see that unpaid work was more than a symptom of gender bias. It was an area where change could promote women’s empowerment, and I wanted to know more.

  The Pioneers

  For a long time, economists didn’t recognize unpaid work as work—nor the bias that declared certain tasks “women’s work,” nor the bias that undervalued that work, nor the bias that divided that work unequally between men and women. For years, when economists assessed the productivity of a family farm, they measured the hours of those who worked on the farm, but they didn’t count the hours of the women whose cooking and cleaning and caregiving allowed the farmworkers to be productive. Even very sophisticated analysts missed this work for years. They either didn’t see it at all or they dismissed its importance, reasoning that this is just the way the world works—women have this additional burden, like childbearing.

  The failure of economists to acknowledge unpaid work got even more absurd as more women entered the formal workforce. A woman would put in a full day at work. When she finished her paid work, she’d help the kids with homework, vacuum the living room, do the laundry, cook the dinner, and put the kids to bed—hours and hours of work that were going completely unnoticed and uncounted.

  An economist named Marilyn Waring sa
w the deep bias and began looking for ways to change it. Elected to New Zealand’s Parliament in 1975 when she was just 23 years old, she knew what it was like to be a working woman and to be ignored by the men who made the rules. But when she went looking for the research on women’s unpaid work, she couldn’t find it. She asked a male economist to help her, and he told her: “Oh, Marilyn, there is no definitive work on it. You know enough; you write it.”

  So Waring traveled around the world studying unpaid work—and she calculated that if you hired workers at the market rate to do all the unpaid work women do, unpaid work would be the biggest sector of the global economy. And yet economists were not counting this as work.

  Waring framed it this way: You pay for childcare in the marketplace. You pay for gas to run a stove. You pay a factory to make food from grain. You pay for water when it comes through a tap. You pay for a meal served in a restaurant. You pay for clothes washed in a laundry. But if a woman does it all by herself—caring for children, chopping firewood, grinding grain, fetching water, cooking meals, and washing clothes—no one pays her for it. No one even counts it, because it’s “housework,” and it’s “free.”

  Waring published the book If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics in 1988. As American economist Julie Nelson put it, “Marilyn Waring’s work woke people up.”

  In 1985, the UN had adopted a resolution asking countries to start counting women’s unpaid labor by 2000. After Waring published her book, they moved up the deadline to 1995.

  In 1991, a female member of the US Congress introduced a bill that would have required the Bureau of Labor Statistics to count housework, childcare, and other unpaid work in its time-use surveys. The bill didn’t pass (women made up only 6 percent of Congress at the time). It was reintroduced in 1993 and again in 1995. Each time, it was rejected.

  As Waring wrote, “Men won’t easily give up a system in which half the world’s population works for next to nothing,” especially as men recognize that “precisely because that half works for so little, it may have no energy left to fight for anything else.”

  Finally, in 2003, the Bureau of Labor Statistics started conducting a national time-use survey that measured housework and childcare hours. It shows that men have more time for recreational activities like playing games and exercising, while women not only do more unpaid work but do more work altogether.

  Acknowledging this problem has led to some efforts to fix it. After Waring published her book, economist Diane Elson came up with a three-part framework to shrink the gap between the time men spend on unpaid work and the time women spend on it. She called it the 3 Rs: recognize, reduce, redistribute.

  Elson says we need to start by recognizing that unpaid work is being done. That’s why we need to get governments to count the hours women spend in unpaid work. Then we can reduce the number of hours that unpaid work takes, using technologies like cookstoves or washing machines or improved breast pumps. Finally, we can redistribute the work we can’t reduce, so that men and women share it more equitably.

  Thinking about the concept of unpaid work shapes the way I see what happens in our house. I want to be honest—I’ve had terrific long-term help in raising our children and managing our household tasks. I don’t know all the personal struggles of other couples who have to balance work with the responsibilities of family and home. I can’t speak for them, and I would never compare my situation with theirs. But I do know an imbalance in unpaid work when I see it in my own home—and I see it! It’s a lot of work raising kids: taking them to school, to the doctor, to sports practice and drama lessons; supervising homework; sharing meals; keeping the family connected to friends at birthday parties, weddings, and graduations. It takes a lot of time. And at different points, I have come to Bill, exhausted, and said “Help!”

  When Jenn started kindergarten in the fall of 2001, we found a school that was ideal for her, but it was thirty or forty minutes away and across a bridge, and I knew I would be driving back and forth from home to school twice a day. When I complained to Bill about all the time I would be spending in the car, he said, “I can do some of that.” And I said, “Seriously? You’ll do that?” “Sure,” he said. “It’ll give me time to talk with Jenn.”

  So Bill started driving. He’d leave our house, drop Jenn at school, turn around, drive back past our neighborhood and on to Microsoft. Twice a week he did that. About three weeks in, on my days, I started noticing a lot of dads dropping kids off in the classroom. So I went up to one of the moms and said, “Hey, what’s up? There are a lot of dads here.” She said, “When we saw Bill driving, we went home and said to our husbands, ‘Bill Gates is driving his child to school; you can, too.’”

  One night, a few years later, I was once again the last one in the kitchen after dinner, cleaning up for the five of us, and in a fit of personality I declared, “Nobody leaves the kitchen until Mom leaves the kitchen.” There’s nothing about being a mom that means I have to clean up while others wander off. Bill supported that—even if I did have to allow him his own niche as the guy who wants to wash the dishes because no one else gets it just right.

  If I tried to read the minds of my readers here, I would worry that some of you might be thinking, Oh, no—the privileged lady is tired of being the last one in the kitchen all by herself. But she doesn’t have to get up before the sun. Her kids don’t have to take the bus. Her childcare support is reliable. She has a partner who is willing to drive the kids and do the dishes. I know. I know. I’m describing my own scene not because it’s a problem but because it’s my vantage point on the problem.

  Every family has its own way of coping, and all families can use help managing the tasks of raising kids and running the home. So in the summer of 2018, I met with researchers I’m funding and asked them to go into ten communities across the United States to study how families manage their caregiving responsibilities—what labor-saving devices they use, how they divide the work, how public policy helps them, and how income affects the way they care for family members.

  The way the researchers talked about their work was very moving to me. To care is human—and caring for children or aging parents should be an expression of love. It can offer us some of the most meaningful moments of our lives. But if it’s assumed that women will do all these tasks, then caring that should be joyful becomes a burden, and work that should be shared becomes isolating. I hope this research will give us a good picture of the trade-offs Americans make. What prompts some people to forgo income to raise kids and run the household? What prompts some to work from home and others to work outside the home? And what are the gender biases embedded in these decisions? Exploring these questions could lead to public policy and market-based approaches that help people juggle the duties of caring for a family—so we can all do more of what makes life meaningful.

  Discovering Hidden Bias

  We can’t solve inequality in unpaid work until we see the gender bias beneath it. Exposing gender bias is a stunning experience for people who suddenly see their own blind spots—it doesn’t matter where on earth you live.

  A few years ago, I went to rural Malawi and watched as men and women held a dialogue designed by a local group to expose hidden bias. I remember sitting in a circle of men and women under a big tree next to a farm plot. In front of us, a farmer named Ester held up a big piece of white presentation paper and drew a clock. She asked the male farmers sitting in the circle to walk her through what their day typically looked like. They chatted about how much time they spent working the field, sleeping, eating, and relaxing.

  Then Ester did the same thing for the women. Their days were much more crowded. Between fetching firewood and water, cooking, and caring for kids, these women already had a full-time job before they set foot in the fields. That left them with less time to tend to their own plots—even though their families relied on what they produced to survive.

  There was a lot of laughter and joking among the men, but some of it came from the awkwardness of
what they were discovering: Their wives worked much harder than they did. The men were clearly surprised. They said they’d never really noticed just how busy their wives were.

  In another training that I saw the same day, men and women acted out a typical dinnertime meal. In Malawi, men traditionally eat first, apart from the family, and get first pick of the food. Afterward, their wives and children get what’s left. So a group of volunteers acted this out for the group—a man scarfing down the food while his wife and children look on hungrily. Another group of volunteers then showed another way: a family talking and eating together at the table, everyone getting their fill.

  A third exercise they did, my favorite, was called Person versus Thing. In this one, a wife and husband switch places. She gets to order him around, directing him to do the tasks that are considered her responsibility. He has to try to imagine her burden of work and see what it feels like to be told what to do. People I spoke with in the village who had done this exercise with their spouses months before told me it was a turning point in their marriage.

  After the exercises, I asked a group of men who had already completed this training how it had affected them. One man said he used to hide most of the money he made so that his wife wouldn’t make him spend it on the family. Another talked about how he used to force his wife to do things that were “women’s work.” He said, “At first the word ‘gender’ had no meaning. My wife tried to explain it to me, but I couldn’t see how a man could do a woman’s job, or a woman could do a man’s job.”

  The gender exercises changed all that. The men talked about how they now share in the household chores, and they and their wives make decisions together. One man told me that he likes how his wife challenges his decisions because “what she says is sensible.”