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| Sunday, 12 December 2004 |
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Features |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
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On the 'labour saving' domestic front : It's a hard life by John Elliott Domestic appliances designed to make life easier are failing to reduce the overall amount of time spent doing housework.
The surprise findings are the result of a study of thousands of households in which the amount of time spent on household tasks by people who owned five common items was compared with those who did not own them. Using a complex statistical technique, researchers established that in general there was no link between owning "labour-saving" items and spending less time on housework. The authors, three Australian university academics, believe that people use the devices simply to achieve ever-higher standards of cleanliness and refinement in their home, rather than to free up time for other pursuits. Writing in the British Journal of Sociology, the authors state: "The analysis of this data shows that domestic technology rarely reduces women's unpaid working time and even, paradoxically, produces some increases in domestic labour." They sum up: "Our overall conclusion is that owning domestic technology rarely reduces unpaid household work." They argue that investing in some kitchen appliances saves no time at all: "Despite the microwave's capacity to cook food in a fraction of the time needed by conventional stoves, owning a microwave has no significant effect on the time-use patterns of women." The researchers posited that this was because eating quickly cooked meals did not fit with the popular image of successful family life. Owners of microwaves used them only very occasionally, when in a rush, and would still tend generally to cook traditionally. Even dishwashers do not save work overall: "It would seem reasonable to expect that a dishwasher, by reducing the time required for meal clean-up, might lower the overall time spent in the kitchen. Contrary to expectations, dishwashers appear to have no significant effect on either the time women spend in food or drink preparation and clean-up, or the daily hours devoted to housework." This was put down partly to the time spent stacking and unstacking the dishwasher, as well as the tendency for families to use more plates and utensils in the knowledge that they did not have to wash them by hand. The same could be true of clothes dryers as families had the incentive to wash and dry more garments. The research team found that owning a clothes dryer actually increased the amount of time their owners spent on laundry by three minutes a day. The ownership of household items affects men and women in different ways. The presence of a deep freezer results in men spending three minutes less in food preparation a day than men who do not own them. Owning a lawnmower is the sign of a domestically conscientious man. Men who have invested in a lawnmower or hedge-trimmer spend about nine minutes longer a day looking after the garden. They spend 15 minutes longer on housework in general than men who do not own them, according to the research. The authors are Michael Bittman, James Mahmud Rice and Judy Wajcman, a visiting professor of sociology at the London School of Economics. Their study looked at data from 4,500 households in Australia. Wajcman said: "Higher income households will have more appliances but they will use those to maintain larger more refined and more pleasant homes." Aggie MacKenzie, who presented the television show How Clean is Your House? with Kim Woodburn, said that housework had expanded to encompass new tasks as our sense of what makes a good home life has developed. MacKenzie said: "It's washing out the smoothie-maker, washing out the coffee-maker and washing the yoga mat. There's also cleaning out the laptop keyboard." Esther Rantzen, the writer and broadcaster, agreed with the academics. "We've got a lot more technological and it doesn't save much time. Also there's all the time you have to spend reading the instructions," she said. "Take the dishwasher. By the time you're stacked it, restacked it and destacked it you might have taken as much time as if you'd filled a sink with soapy water." It was a view shared by Lindsay Nicholson, editor-in-chief of Good Housekeeping magazine, who said that the value of some devices might lie not in time saved, but in the quality of the result. Dishwashers, for example, were often more hygienic than hand-washing because of the high temperatures involved. However, she conceded that not all devices were useful and claimed that the sandwich toaster should be top of that list: "Everyone's got one but there's only a certain number of times a year when you want to eat something with a scalding hot filling. "They are very difficult to clean and everyone's sandwich toaster ends up with cheese around the hinges and it's disgusting. Then they sit at the back of the cupboard and dust collects on top of the encrusted cheese." Courtesy: UK, Sunday Times |
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Those who own dishwashers, deep freezers, clothes dryers and microwaves
can even sometimes take longer to do their chores than those who do not.
