The Herald (Glasgow)

The Herald (Glasgow)

February 24, 2001

SECTION: Pg. 8

LENGTH: 3168 words

HEADLINE: The working women's club: Paying someone to organise your life is increasingly popular among busy men and women - but their liberation from domestic drudgery means someone has to take on those menial chores. And - surprise, surprise - that someone is an army of women

BYLINE: By Lesley Mcdowell

Getting someone else to clear up after you has never been so popular, according to statistics. It's a phenomenon that's been given much press recently - the number of those employed in the area of domestic services has risen by almost 20% in the past five years and as a nation we spend approximately £4 billion on paying someone else to wash our tenement-close stairs, clean our bathrooms, sweep up the leaves in our driveways.

A job that was once the prerogative of the housewife, or the indulgent husband on a Saturday morning, is now being put out to professional tendering by a class of twentysomethings and thirtysomethings too busy, too lazy or too downright inept to do it themselves. Those feminists who downed tools and demanded a change in domestic roles did not envisage this - their point was for men and women to share their household tasks. Now men and women are more likely to share the bill that they pay someone else to do it all for them.

And what's wrong with that? Almost everyone knows someone who pays someone else for those dirty jobs we don't like, whether it's getting the windows cleaned or the hedge trimmed. In fact, there are some household jobs that have always been done by others, depending on how much money you had.

What's so new about having a cleaner?

For Glasgow-based companies like Selclene or Molly Mopps, an extension into the private domain is part of the service demanded not just by lazy or busy professionals. A spokeswoman for Molly Mopps cites the increase in elderly clients, especially with the cessation of home-help support. They also cater for the disabled and people at home with children. Some 45% of Selclene's clients, though, do come from the business sector, and of that the take-up is almost 95% women.

The boom in personal services doesn't stop at traditional household tasks. For some time now it's been possible to hire someone to de-clutter your house (Annya Ladakh's London-based Clear Space), or put up those flat-packs once you get home from Ikea (from one of the few Scottish-based companies, Homework or Screwdriver). You can have someone do your shopping for you (courtesy of the Fresh Food Company), or drive you home from the pub in your own car so you don't have to worry about where you might have left it the night before. You can also pay to have someone wait in for the gasman, have your suit dry -cleaned, feed your pets while you're on holiday or just remind you that it's your Mum's birthday on Saturday.

Ladakh offers to clear out cupboards, studies, spare rooms, anywhere that is spilling over with mess and that you just can't face clearing yourself. For this service, however, the demand is predominantly female. Why?

"One reason is that half of my clients are women with families," Ladakh says. "And clutter is the family. The home is still seen as women's responsibility. And about half of my clients don't tell their husbands they have employed me.

"For one reason, they prefer to have their husbands think they have done it themselves, and second, there would be a row if their husbands knew. I have lost clients to husbands who objected to employing someone to do what they consider to be a woman's job even if she is also working.

Writing on that very subject last year, conservative critic Mary Kenny refuted such trendy left-wing notions and argued that men "are ill-adapted for carrying out caring and sharing domestic duties at the same level as females . . . men's brains are just not wired up that way."

Braidwood agrees with that assessment. "You can try to encourage men to do these things, but it's just not worth it," she says. "Some men are good at them but in my experience most of them aren't. I spent a year looking after my dad and my brother and it was a full-time job. I had to remember everything for them, remind them about the car, about birthdays, everything. And I thought, I could get paid for doing this."

Ah - the nub of the whole thing. Back to Friedan and Co. Paid housework at last. Or is it? Is Braidwood responding to and exploiting men's unwillingness to take on minor tasks for themselves, or is she merely being paid to do the kind of drudgery that women fought to get away from? Is this about sound business sense or is it just a new way of getting women back in the kitchen?

"Ten years ago nobody would have looked at a business proposition like this," Braidwood continues. "It would have been frowned upon to use a service like this. Now it's almost like a status symbol, you know, 'I've got a woman who comes in and does all that for me' kind of thing, 'I've got the money, I can afford to have someone do it all.' ''

And that someone does indeed turn out to be, as it all too often does, a woman, as Braidwood says.

Braidwood has contracts with a number of those providing domestic services, and while many of the more refined tasks, like sending flowers, are performed by small companies run by both men and women, she does admit that when it comes to ironing it's only ever women who provide this service, as Molly Mopps confirmed, saying that women formed the majority of their workforce.

Gill Scott, senior lecturer at Glasgow Caledonian University and a specialist in poverty issues, argues it is still predominantly women who get involved in the service industry in spite of attempts to make it glossy, or to professionalise it. And for women who work in this industry, employment still tends to be casual and low-paid. Any flexibility is for the service receivers, not the service providers.

She also argues that associating these kinds of services so much with women keeps it on a lower level. This kind of work is invariably identified with women's work, she says, and when women do it for themselves it is not seen as contributing to production. But when they do it for someone else, it is.

It is a point endorsed by feminist commentator Yvonne Roberts, who doesn't have a problem with the broad range of personal services on offer, or even with young men being the main target of Braidwood's Hectic Life company. "I think she's wrong, though," Roberts says. Supporting the figures of companies like Selclene which see a predominance in female customers over male ones, she says: "I myself earn a living to pay other women to do the things I used to do. And there's an increasing number of young women who aren't domesticated at all. If I were (Braidwood) I would target them, and hire young men to do the cleaning instead."

Where Roberts also feels the real problem lies is with the value placed on this kind of work. "There's nothing wrong really with this kind of reincarnation of the service industry of Edwardian times, which is what it is," she says. "It's just entrepreneurship. The problem is with people not being paid properly.

There's a low price put on the caring industries and the personal service industry because they're considered to be a woman's natural domain." She cites Scandinavian countries where one-third of employees in the child care sector, for instance, have, by law, to be male. That male presence has seen wages in the industry rise.

Both Scott and Roberts invite the question: if men were to work in the home, would their efforts be seen as productive or not? We may never know until more are involved in the service industry. It's a complex negotiation between master and servant, men and women.

As one final test, I ask a male friend, an architect with a sports car who would fit in perfectly with Braidwood's target group, if he would consider using the kind of service that she is providing. He's a busy professional, he works long hours; can he always remember or be bothered to get a birthday present for his mum? He stops to think.

"I think if you're a professional," he says, "then you should be professional in your private life as well as your work life. Get a diary and sort it out for yourself."

Oh - and he does his own ironing, too. Betty and Shirley would be proud.

Photographs: Gordon Terris

GRAPHIC: Cash rich, time poor: Hilary Braidwood, right, the brains behind Hectic Life, an Edinburgh-based company that provides domestic services for affluent and busy men

LOAD-DATE: March 09, 2001

The Observer

January 31, 1999

SECTION: The Observer News Page; Pg. 18

conflict over housework is now one of the top three reasons people end up having marriage guidance counselling.

Dual-career couples are increasingly employing cleaners and other domestic staff. The number of people working in domestic services has risen by 17 per cent in the past four years, compared to a general rise in employment of less than 3 per cent.

The battle of the sexes over the kitchen sink can be seen in two ways. On one hand, women still do the bulk of domestic work, and still do a disproportionate amount when both partners work. Women do 65 per cent of unpaid work. On the other hand, the share of domestic labour done by men has gone up in the past 30 years as women have entered the workforce in greater numbers.

IN THE 1960s women did 80 per cent of the housework. Mothers staying in work is the key factor behind the growing willingness by men to wield the Hoover and iron.

When wives move from the home to full-time work, their husbands tack an extra four hours on to their household chores. The wives, meantime, cut their contribution by 10 hours. If current trends continue, absolute equality will be attained within two to three decades. Which is good news, according to Adrienne Burgess, social commentator and author of Fatherhood Reclaimed. She has little truck with criticisms of men for not pulling their weight.

The Mirror (London?)

May 18, 1998, Monday

SECTION: FEATURES; Pg. 22, 23

LENGTH: 1996 words

HEADLINE: WHY SUPERWOMAN IS A MYTH; MIRROR SURVEY SHOWS MUMS DON'T WANT TO JUGGLE A JOB, HOUSEWORK AND KIDS; SURVEY OF WOMEN'S ATTITUDE TO WORK AND FAMILY LIFE

BYLINE: Clare Grant

BODY:

By CLARE GRANT

SHE is a dynamo in the office, a super-chef at home and keeps her household in tip-top order. She also looks a million dollars.

This is the woman of 1998 - or is it?

The politicians, spin doctors and women's magazines might have us believe this.

But according to a definitive Mirror survey, she is stressed-out and desperate to stay at home with her children.

For most women, this superwoman status goes against all her basic instincts. It will horrify feminists and politicians trying to get more females into the workplace for the year 2000- but the evidence is there.

The Mirror set out to discover what women feel about their lives at the turn of the century. We commissioned an independent nationwide poll of 1,500 women aged 20-40.

We found that in spite of the dramatic social revolution of the last 10 years, eight in ten women put their children above anything else and are prepared to make sacrifices at home or work to achieve that.

But our survey also reveals attitudes of men need to be challenged if women are to find the right balance in their lives.

It is hard to believe but one in ten modern men are guilty of hitting their partners - and forty per cent of cases are fuelled by booze.

New Man appears not to exist and the poll shows women are sick of the fantasy. It also shows women are more depressed by the pressures - the need to work to pay the mortgage, being guilt-ridden at the lack of time with children, running a household and on top of this, worrying she doesn't look like a size 10 glossy magazine woman.

Our poll reveals that women are often happier without a regular man in their lives, One in two single woman are content to stay that way and one in three is not looking for a man to marry until well into her thirties.

Most say they have lots of friends and enjoy their own company and over half say they are never lonely, particularly the under-25s who are least likely to be looking for a boyfriend.

Here we look at the views of women on sex, motherhood, men's careers and marriage. It provides a compelling and sometimes surprising picture of Millennium Woman.

ALMOST two thirds of British women work but despite the dramatic changes in expectations wrought by feminism, the great majority are surprisingly traditional when it comes to the crunch.

One of the most interesting results of the study came from a question asking: "What comes first in your life?"

Women were asked to choose between children, their partner, themselves and work. Of those with children, virtually all (92 per cent) say their children come first. Almost no one puts work first.

Among the full-time workers who might be expected to put careers first, only one in 10 consider their jobs to be top of their list of priorities. And even where women have no children, only a tenth say work is their priority

The poll shows eight in 10 women work primarily for financial reasons and would probably give up paid work if money were not an issue.

Around one half of women enjoy working because of the social aspect and because it gives them some financial independence. A third of women work full -time, a third part-time and a third are housewives.

Catherine Hakim, a sociologist at the London School Of Economics, says: "It isn't socially acceptable to say you enjoy being a full-time mother and don't want to work.

"But many women find that having children and bringing them up is the most rewarding activity in their lives and changes their priorities between family and work.

"One important factor driving women into paid work, or forcing them to stay in work after they marry and have children, is that most young couples today have a mortgage to support which often large enough to require two incomes on a long-term basis.

"But overall, having children gives women a tremendous feeling of achievement, so they don't feel the need to succeed in other ways."

FAR from reflecting a modern Britain of single women, our poll shows home is still what counts. Three quarters of women live with a man and more than half are married.

But while there have been huge social changes for women, men appear not to have changed at all.

New Man is a myth when it comes to the home. Nearly all couples make decisions together but that is where the joint responsibility ends. Almost all women feel they have the sole responsibility for running the house and half wished their partners helped more. Findings include: 86 per cent of women wash the clothes compared to three per cent of men and 79 per cent of women do the ironing but only eight per cent of men will do the task.

Social psychologist Dr Christine Griffin, of Birmingham University, says: "There is much talk about equality, sharing and New Man. But there is a long way to go."

"Men do a bit but do it badly and sometimes they sulk so much if they have to do something, it is easier not to ask them again." WHILE today's modern woman is branded a a career-obsessed breed opting for early sterilisation, two thirds have children and most others plan to have them. What has changed is that women are having children later - more than a third aged between 25 and 34 don't yet have kids. One in three waits until her late twenties or early thirties and a fifth of the over-35-year-olds are childless but expect to have them sometime.

O'ne in 12 women say they never want babies and sadly there are four per cent who want a child but can't have one. Among working mums, a third wish they could spend more time with their children and one in ten feel guilty about leaving them.

Hardly anyone regrets having children although one in four women has suffered from post-natal depression. A third of women say they are closer to their partners since they had children even though half of all dads are with their children less than 30 hours a week.

Evolutionary psychologist Dr Lance Workman explains: "We have to reproduce to survive and despite the sophistication of the age, this does not change. No matter what the cultural changes are, most women want children.

"Women have children later because they now have the opportunity to nest- build. They have the means to create a secure and independent financial footing so they can have better resources for their children.