Gulderen Öztansu                     
gulderenoztns@gmail.com

When will women not have a “second shift”?

In recent years, some people have been questioning if feminism is still relevant in the 21^st century society. The notions that underpin this suspicion may root from being starry-eyed following the advancements made for gender equality and failing to see that the impact of the war on gender inequality has not changed everybody’s lives in a symmetrical fashion, particularly for people originating from the developing world. Another reason for wondering if the feminist movement has peaked for the time being derives from the fact that we are all going through continuous gender socialisation, sometimes from the moment that we are born. The messages drilled into our brains allow gender conformity to operate without us being aware of it so that we might think certain things are out of line or unrealistic for feminist social change to achieve, therefore creating the idea that feminism has reached its limits.

Of course, with global gendered domestic violence rates, political underrepresentation, the fact that of married couples, men out-earn their spouses in every single country and many more battles where feminism is needed for both women and men to lead better, equal lives, the expiration of our need for feminism is nothing more than a false perception. Moreover, we need feminism so we can guard the gains that have been made in the past. Social change does not only ‘go forward’ as seen by some. The Iranian Revolution of the 1970s is one of the examples where gained rights were lost for women. Today US residents are protesting the US Supreme Court as a threat over their right to abortion lingers unnervingly.

Evidently, feminism is still very much needed, and it is possible that it will be needed as long as societies exist. In fact, perhaps the feminist movement has too much on its plate, an ever-growing field that better represents more and more people of different ages, social classes, ethnic origins, sexual orientations, and gender identities as time goes on. The movement is also continuously held responsible wherever it fails to properly represent everyone.

The sheer magnitude and the urgency of these aforementioned issues have had a negative impact on my engagement with the movement over the years, which is what I would like to talk about. I have fallen victim to gender conformity where certain inequalities that have been dressed up as “unrealistic” and not as emergent started to fall off my radar. These can be the simple, day-to-day things such as attending to guests in a Cypriot household, the division of domestic chores or sexist language used by some people in daily dialogues. Trying to confront these infringements can lead to unpleasant responses. For instance, you can be identified as overly critical for focusing on such “petty things” or you are focusing on the “wrong stuff” simply because women in other parts of the world live in worse conditions that do not compare to segregated conjugal roles or archaic sexist phrases. Unequally divided domestic chores is a huge problem in the North of Cyprus- lack of research into this field will stop me from providing evidence for this. However, data from the Organisation for the Economic Co-operation and Development shows that Japanese men, who “do the least amount of [domestic] unpaid work” in the world, spent 40 minutes per day on domestic work and Turkish men did just 20 minutes more than this per day in their domestic settings in 2019. Turkish women, on the other hand, carry the burden of over 300 minutes of housework per day, supporting the term “second Shift” as some of these women also take on paid work outside the house that can be considered merely the first shift. The data does not include an individual assessment for the Republic of Cyprus which is the other country that would provide a meaningful comparison to the North of Cyprus, along with Turkey.

When I look around, I am faced with the continuity of traditional gender roles that perpetuate the “second shift” for women. Feminism has helped a great deal but not enough to emancipate most women, even the highly educated upcoming generation, from the burden of a “second shift” at the house. Where feminism has helped, it has helped those who are economically abled to replace themselves with domestic workers to do the housework instead of them. These workers are almost unanimously women and sometimes from minority ethnic origins. Is it really a move in the right direction if our relief to the gender gap in housework is to replace female homeowners with paid workers instead? The shift from housework being unpaid to being paid for is certainly an advantage because now women get something in turn for their work. Where we need to focus on is the societal attitudes; these stream only women into paid domestic work and where domestic work is unpaid, social attitudes cause it to fall mostly on women. 

The “second shift” affects women every day but the fight on this front is so quiet. It is women’s families and loved ones that impose a gender-based domestic burden on them at the end of the day, so it should not be surprising that there is not a huge focus on the patriarchy that is embodied by the people closest to us. It also requires us to snap out of our daily lives that we can be so wrapped up in, to think deeply about the general social expectations that ask women to make the coffees for the guests. But in reality, these expectations in sum cost women their health, career and academic advancement as well as fulfilment.

This is not to say that exceptions do not exist. People are increasingly aware of their right to step away from socially constructed gender roles; young boys and men feel freer to enjoy domestic interests without judgement and some are opening their eyes to the responsibility that falls on them, whereas girls and women can be heard defending their right to equality in their homes and turning down unequal expectations for them. Furthermore, some women might be happy with the social arrangements that they are in, these arrangements might work well for them. For me, I will continue to imagine what a world without gendered domestic roles might look like -and how long it will take the feminist movement to get us there- every time my Cypriot coffee is brought to me by the females in a house full of both women and men.