Diksha Madhok shared this thought-provoking graph on Twitter recently:
Father's Day and all is great but Indian dudes really need to look at this chart and hang their heads in shame. Globally, Indian men–husbands and fathers–do the least amount of unpaid housework. pic.twitter.com/mxgQSAtwX7
— Diksha Madhok (@dikshamadhok) June 18, 2018
My first reaction to that was, ‘Really? Indian men do 19 minutes of unpaid housework every day? That’s too much! What do they do for 19 minutes?‘
That said, while the point being made is no doubt valid, the metric being used to illustrate it is off. The reason for that is that middle-class Indian couples probably do less combined unpaid housework than their Western counterparts because servants are so common. In our household, for example, we have employed a maid who comes every morning to wash dishes, clean the house and so on. In Western households, it is common to have to do it all yourself.
So the correct metric, to judge how lazy, misogynistic and/or entitled Indian men are would be the percentage of total unpaid household labour they contribute to. I have no doubt that the conclusion would be as dismal.
As for these Slovenian men, grrmph. I bet they can’t play cricket as well as us.