in Spain: Government application for man to share housework with their woman!

Spain has announced plans to create an app that will address the gender imbalance in housework by making users log the hours they spend doing housework, according to the British newspaper The Times.

Angela Rodriguez, the second official in the Spanish Ministry of Equality, said that the ministry intends to create a free electronic application that will enable men and women to record the number of hours they spend doing housework.

Rodriguez's remarks came in the Swiss city of Geneva during a conference of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, where she was presenting a report on women's rights in Spain, and she said during her speech: "We women spend more time than men doing domestic tasks."

This comes at a time when a survey conducted by the National Institute of Statistics in Spain revealed that nearly 50% of the women who participated in the survey said that they perform most of the housework in their homes, compared to only 14.9% of the men who participated in the survey.

This problem often causes disputes, some of which soon turn into legal lawsuits. A Spanish court in the northern province of Cantabria ruled in April 2017 that a man should pay his ex-wife more than 23,000 euros (about 25,000 US dollars) for the housework she undertook during the six years they spent together.

The online application, which is part of the Spanish government's "Shared Responsibility Plan", is not yet in place and bids are being submitted to decide which company will commission the project, and it should be made available to the public this summer.

The plan for the application includes that it be characterized by "focusing on the feminist dimension" and that it "sheds light on many of the invisible tasks" that women perform at home. The purpose is to introduce the general public to what is known as “mental load”, a term coined by the French sociologist Monique Haicolt in 1984, to refer to the unpaid work that women do and the mental effort they put into housework.

Among the examples that Rodriguez mentioned in her speech at the Geneva conference on these actions: cleaning the kitchen, which is not limited to physical effort, but includes other tasks, such as preparing to provide sufficient dishwashing liquid, and that the refrigerator is well-equipped.

While the Spanish newspaper ABC said that the electronic application is scheduled to cost 211,750 euros (about 229 thousand US dollars) to be created, and the ministry hopes that it will allow users to know how long each person spends doing household chores.

Rodriguez indicated that the use of the application will not be limited to people in relationships, but will be useful for "sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, and those who live with roommates and living partners whose lives are permeated by an uneven distribution of household tasks at times."

Source: Arab Post