Thursday, February 25, 2016

Gates wants men in the kitchen

The Bill Gates Foundation is supposedly saving the world, but I have my doubts. According to the latest report:
According to Gates, “globally, women spend an average of 4.5 hours a day on unpaid work. Men spend less than half that much time.” The unpaid labor gap is especially large in poor countries. “In India, to take one example, women spend about six hours, and men spend less than one hour,” she writes.

And when women are too busy cleaning and cooking, they have less time for paid work. Girls in many countries fall behind in school because they're swamped with tedious chores. Gates writes that reducing women’s unpaid labor from five hours per day to three can increase a country’s female labor-force participation rate by 10 percent. If women participated in the economy at the same levels as men, she writes, global GDP could increase by 12 percent. ...

Couples should start having conversations about how they can redistribute unpaid chores more fairly, Gates says. That means more American dads pushing vacuum cleaners, and more husbands like one Gates met in Tanzania, who volunteered to help his wife fetch water. ...

For those who think it can’t be done, Gates offers an example from her personal life. Though Bill and the couples’ children would always help with after-dinner cleanup, she nevertheless was always the last person left in the kitchen, “doing those last few little things.”
Is increasing "global GDP" really their goal? I guess it would increase if they replace unpaid labor with paid labor, but why is that desirable?

A billionaire wife nags her family into a more equitable system for cleaning up the kitchen, and that somehow sets an example for the Third World?

I think that 50 years from now, it will be clear that the Gates Foundation made the world worse.

Update: Here is a video of Bill Gates promoting his letter.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

What's amazing is that people assume there is some dramatic mandate for economic productivity to include women in the paid labor force. Raising a bunch of screwed up kids apparently costs nothing. The truth is that there has been a glut of labor after developed countries started automation and offshoring. Just watch the discovery channel series How It's Made. They want women in the labor force and in the battle field because they are pagan degenerates. I don't worry too much because idiots are getting punished with lower birthrates. They might win the battle but they will never win the war.

Roger said...

Yes, I think that automation is going to give us an excess of labor for the foreseeable future. Those automated factories are getting more sophisticated all the time.

Richard C. Lambert said...

” The unpaid labor gap is especially large in poor countries. “In India, to take one example, women spend about six hours, and men spend less than one hour,” she writes.
Lisa W. Degregorio