The Gender Ministry will soon table before cabinet a bill that ensures valuation of unpaid care work in divorce settlement cases, after research found that Rwandan women spend disproportionately more time than men on domestic labour. One would say this is long overdue, given Rwanda’s gender sensitive gender reforms dating back close to three decades now but this is not a phenomenon exclusive to Rwanda. The first known person to be compensated for unpaid housework in the world was a Chinese woman, in 2021. In the same year, a high court judge in Kenya granted Mary Wambui half of the marital home in her divorce settlement, following 13 years of marriage. Such cases have happened here and there, but they are still considered “landmark cases” even when ‘homemakers’ in our societies are typically women, and divorce cases rampant. As good as the bill sounds on that issue, women who don’t choose to be ‘homemakers’ still bear a bigger burden than their spouses when it comes to domestic labour. Some women in our communities still wake up earlier than everyone in the household and are last to go to bed because they have to juggle work life and home affairs. According to UN Women Rwanda's 2022 baseline survey on unpaid care work status among women and men, women spend on average 7.1 hours per day working on unpaid care work while men spend 2.1 hours only. It is not so much different from urban women who spend 6.9 hours per day while their male counterparts spend 2.1 hours. Every hour a woman spends on unpaid care work is one hour less she could potentially spend on market-related activities or acquiring educational and vocational skills, not forgetting that sometimes, it comes at a cost. For instance, some women can’t take on decent paying jobs or full-time jobs, which reduces their chance at having pension and other employment benefits. Globally, 75 percent of housework is done by women and girls, which shows the tremendous unequal distribution of labour in a household, yet without it, society cannot function. The International Labour Organisation estimates the value of unpaid care and domestic work to be as much as 9 percent of global GDP (USD 11 trillion), with women's contribution at around 6.6 percent of GDP compared to men's at 2.4 percent of GDP. It is high time we tackled gender stereotypes to reduce the burden women carry by equal distribution of household labour, and value the services provided with reasonable compensation.
