Never do your work on your bed, they say. For there must be a distinction between your work and rest.

And so, when your father comes home, he can comfortably leave his profession by the door. He, who was stuck in traffic, who was berated by his superior, who had to berate his subordinate, whose car broke down, can come home and just be a father.

And even if you bring home your assignments, you can step out of your room and rest in the living room or snack on fruits. Fortunately, you don’t always have to be a student, you can rest and just be your parents’ child.

But how should a mother lay if the bed sheet is due for a change? Can she sit around in her kitchen if there is family to feed and dishes to do? If a homemaker’s workplace is her home, where does a mother rest? 

Housework is the single most significant unpaid labor in all of history. Whether it is appreciated or unnoticed, it remains existent in all households. While the gap is prominent in eastern countries such as China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, with some men reporting that they do zero hours of domestic work, and not so much in western countries such as Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark, where men on average still do household chores yet still lags an hour less than their female partners, the fact remains the same.

Male members of the household, if they do domestic chores, opt for the ‘masculine’, ‘gender-neutral’ tasks such as gardening, repairs, and taking out the trash. These tasks are done less frequently, such as weekly, monthly, or quarterly, whereas the traditionally ‘feminine’ roles such as cooking and cleaning are expected to be done multiple times a day. 

This is reflective in how many cultures raise sons and daughters. Daughters are expected to help out, whereas sons are allowed more leisure. In fact, UNICEF (2023) reports that girls aged 5-14 spend 160 million more hours every day on domestic chores than their male peers. The leisure that sons typically partake in and daughters are typically excluded from usually involve physical activity, which is said to reflect on their well-being in the long term. 

The responsibilities taught to daughters will lead them to become a wife and/or a mother, which is not very synonymous with a career. The feminist movement has advocated for the opportunity of a wife and a mother to sustain a career, yet the fact remains that wives and mothers are more often than not driven out of the workforce to cater to these unequal responsibilities. 

We have given women the opportunity to win bread, yes. But if we still expect them to make our homes by themselves, what kind of equality is it? Is it truly empowerment if both 50% of the work to sustain a home is placed on the shoulders of our women?

Dismantling the patriarchy goes beyond giving women a seat in a classroom and the office. It is far more involved than that. Professor Kan (2025) asserts that gender essentialism, the simplification of femininity and masculinity, and the responsibilities that we deem to be exclusive to men or women, must be challenged. “Policies such as flexible working, paid parental leave, and better support for childcare can help….”

There is no true equality without questioning the other side of the scale. We cannot tip women’s opportunities, not question the lighter load on men, and expect balanced weights.

Gender equality demands more participation from husbands and fathers in homemaking. Gender equality can only be achieved when we teach our sons to clean, as we have always taught our daughters. We will know we are walking towards a balanced scale when the busiest part of our house is no longer “the woman’s place”, but simply, “the kitchen”.

Before our government is of equal men and women, there are as many female CEOs as males, awards are no longer attached with “female”, and presidentiables are questioned for their competencies and not their sex, our mothers will first have to dine with the supper that our fathers cooked.

We will have fully dismantled the gender gap when homes are no longer wives’ and mothers’ workplace; when she rests on the sheets her son changed.