LETTER FROM ATHENS
“When I moved into my ex-husband’s apartment, his mother still came to do the housework and deliver meals every week. He probably expected me to take over, but that wasn’t the case… We separated after a few months of living together,” said Maria, a woman in her 30s who doesn’t seem surprised by the results of a recent survey on sharing domestic tasks, carried out by the Demographic Studies Center (Barcelona) in 15 European countries (Austria, Belgium, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Norway, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Spain and the United Kingdom).
Having surveyed over 74,000 couples with children under the age of 18, the study reveals that women in Greece spend an average of 282 minutes (over four and a half hours) a day looking after the house, shopping, cooking and taking care of children, compared with 59 minutes for men, making Greece the European country where men do the least. By comparison, in France, women spend an average of 206 minutes a day on domestic chores, as opposed to 111 minutes for men.
On a podcast by news website News247, Marilella Antonopoulou, editor-in-chief of Ladylike, an online women’s magazine, revealed that she takes care of housework and all household chores for “two or three hours a day.” “Yet I’m lucky enough to have help twice a month, and my husband spends a lot of time with the children. I’m not the worst off,” she conceded.
Limited nursery spaces
This inequality in sharing tasks is explained, she said, “because in Greece, as in Italy, we have some of the lowest percentages of working women in Europe. One in seven women has only a part-time job. They automatically take care of the home and children more.” According to the Hellenic Statistical Authority, in November 2023, unemployment among women stood at 11.7%, compared with 7.5% for men. According to the OECD, 13.8% of women work part-time, versus 5.1% of men, based on data from May 2023.
SEV, the Hellenic Federation of Enterprises, has also found that women earn on average 13% less than men. And as the husband often has a higher salary, the woman stops working for several months, even years. This was the case for Maritsa Balanou, a kindergarten teacher who raised her two children until they were 4, when they started school. “My husband, a coastguard, earned more than I did, so I stopped working, but I took the opportunity to do a doctorate. That was my choice. I’d say the problem also comes from employers and institutions. For example, when I went for a job interview, the first thing they asked me was whether I wanted to have another child. Similarly, at school, it never occurs to me to call the father if there’s a problem,” said the 37-year-old woman.
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