The perception of certain work as feminine affects women's work inside and outside the home. As we learned in our lecture, women do much more work in the home than men. We learned that they do 2/3 of the work. We also learned that the work men do is more highly valued, and that women do more repetitive tedious work and tend to multi-tast more. Women are often considered better at house work. There are tons of jokes about how women belong in the kitchen and about how it is there job to clean the house and take care of children. There is also a notion that they are doing house work for someone else. They are supposed to be doing it for their kids, or for their husband. There is also a notion that it is natural for women to be doing such work and that they are inherently more nuturing, clean, and better at household tasks. However, women don't end up with the brunt of house work becasue they are naturally better at it or naturally enjoy it more than men. Things work out this way becasue of gender norms. Women are taught from a young age whether directly or subtly that it is there responsibility to care for children, clean and cook. Boys are also taught this, which is why in a lot of cases, they either think that they can't do housework, or if they really aren't very good at it, they haven't had as much practice or as much experience watching and modeling after adults as they were growing up. There is also somewhat of a social stigma attached with men doing housework or childcare. They don't want to be seen as femminine. Some fathers may be upset at the thought of their son playing with dolls or putting on an apron and playing with a toy kitchen set. This shows how deeply rooted our ideas about gender roles are. Even though on the surface many men and women would say that they think that housework should be shared equally when it comes to the gender norms that children are taught and ideas held about domestic work, people's actions don't always match what they say. There is also the idea that was mentioned in the lecture that men often are considered to be "helping" with house work. This implies that it is naturally women's work, and they are just helping out, as if it is going above and boyond for them to be doing such work. I think that the division of domestic work could become more equal if ideas about gender norms were changed. I don't think its enough to just say that work should be equal, children actually need to be taught from a young age that men can and should perform domestic work and childcare. We also need to get rid of the idea that men who perform domestic work are somehow weak or whipped.

A big part of the problem is the value put on domestic work. In many cases it isn't considered work at all. "Real work" is considered the kind of work that people do outside the home. This means that work done inside the home often has little value. It often goes unnoticed. This is part of why women are more likely to experience poverty than men. Women's jobs outside the home are often jobs in the service industry that are based on women's traditional domestic jobs. Since these jobs aren't highly valued by society they are usually low paying. Even though the law says that women and men must be paid equally for the same job, women are often kept at lower positions than men within the same field, or clustered in lower paying fields which means that they earn less money. The fact that domestic work isn't highly valued also means that it isn't paid when it is performed in the home. I won't go too much into this becasue it relates more to the next module. However this is a huge problem for single mothers. The fact that domestic labor isn't valued is also a problem for other women because women who are full time doemstic workers are viewed as not working at all. This could be very hard on a person emotionally. They don't receive recognition for the work they and they are often viewed negatively for not working outside the home. On the other hand, women who do work outside the home are viewed negatively for supposedly neglecting their families even though they often have to perform a double shift. They work outside the home which is paid and considered actually working, but then they have to come home and perform household work and childcare which isn't paid or highly valued which can cause stress and emotional harship too. The strict gender norms about who is supposed to perform certain domestic tasts may have different consequences for women in lesbian relationships or singel women. Work may be divided more evenly between roomates or female romantic partners, or there might be the problem of who's going to take out the trash, or fix the leaky foscet, since those task are typically conisdered male. I'm not sure exactly how the division of labor would work out in these situations, but it is importnat to recognize that these issues don't only occur in heterosexual situations.