Mother's Work

Motherhood is sexist, or something:

Kimberly Ells at Mercator, who attended the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women, said it was heavily focused on “unpaid care work.” Ells wrote, “I spent a week listening to an endless parade of events focused almost exclusively on ending poverty by eliminating ‘unpaid care work.” “What is ‘unpaid care work,’ you might ask? It is work done in the home without specific monetary payment. Most people would call that kind of work simply being alive,” she continued. “It could also be called running your own castle. But the forces that converged at the United Nations this spring called it an atrocity.” Ellis writes: To be an “unpaid care worker”—especially if you’re a woman—was seen as an afront to human decency. And because on average women worldwide do more labour in the home than men, people in UN circles call this “gender inequality,” “gender injustice,” and even “gender-based violence.” I’m not kidding. I heard these phrases repeated time after time in events sponsored by countries and organizations the world over. While there is such a thing as genuine gender-based violence, vacuuming the floor for free isn’t it. Will freeing women from children will make everyone rich and happy? So how do we solve the grave and unjust gender-inequalities supposedly manifested by women mopping more floors or changing more diapers than men? I saw only one solution proposed by UN partners and it was repeated over and over again: provide state-funded universal daycare for all families. That way, they say, the world can unite behind women and propel them out of the home and into the workforce where they can enjoy true freedom and engage in “socially productive work.” With ‘women’ like Katie Neeves, who serves as the UK’s new UN delegatefor the Commission on the Status of Women, no wonder actual women are being denigrated.

Motherhood is not the most discriminatory job...