The Spanish government is hoping to encourage men to do more at home by developing a free app that will log how much time each household or family member spends on domestic chores.
Announcing the measure in Geneva earlier this week, Spain’s secretary of state for equality, Ángela Rodríguez, said the aim was to shed light on the invisible “mental load” overwhelmingly carried by women when it comes to domestic tasks.
Rodríguez told the UN committee on the elimination of discrimination against women: “We’ll soon be unveiling an app that will allow people to log the household chores that different members of the family perform so we can see how many hours of work we each spend on housework and thus reorder the time we spend doing that housework.”
She said the new app, whose development budget is reported to be €211,750 (£184,000), was designed to ensure that every family member pulled their weight. “We think this is an exercise that could be used at home to share the chores out between sons, daughter, fathers, mothers, or between flatmates or life partners, because the division of those tasks is sometimes unequal,” she said.
Rodríguez said the app would also serve to highlight all the invisible jobs necessary for the smooth running of a house. Although tidying up the kitchen might take 20 minutes, she said, it depended on someone having remembered to buy washing-up liquid or having planned the shopping list.
She later responded to critics of the plan in a tweet, saying: “Ah, privileges. What those who are annoyed by the chore-sharing app are really annoyed about is the possibility of having to start doing their bit at home.”
The app is part of the equality ministry’s shared responsibilities plan, a series of public policies intended to improve equality between men and women.
The ministry said: “The challenge lies in designing comprehensive care systems from a gender, intersectional and human rights perspective that promote shared responsibility between men and women, the state, the market, families and the community.”
A survey last year by Spain’s National Statistics Institute revealed that 45.9% of women performed the majority of domestic chores, compared with just 14.7% of men.
