Alleviation: An International Journal of Nutrition, Gender & Social Development, ISSN 2348-9340 Volume 5, Number 5 (2018):
© Arya PG College, Panipat & Business Press India Publication, Delhi
www.aryapgcollege.com

Involvement of Women and Men in Household Activities and Knowledge Regarding Drudgery Reducing Technology

1. Anshu* and 2. SK Varma
1 PhD Research Scholar & 2 Retired Professor
Department of Extension Education and Communication Management
IC College of Home Sciences
CCS Haryana Agricultural University, Hisar, Haryana, India
*Email: anshugahlawat3@gmail.com

Introduction

The contribution of women in the development process of a country is of two fold, first in the home and second outside the home. From the ancient days, men have worked outside the home to bring in money/food and women have worked inside. Due to women being the only one capable of giving child birth and feeding, this was a logical way to split responsibilities.
As with many things in our culture, as responsibilities of women slowly changed to include education and working and earning money, there has been a lag in society catching up. Older generations who lived in the earlier times hold on stubbornly to that way of life and expect newer generations to act in that way too. This has led to the unfortunate system of women being educated and working outside the home but also having to work inside the home with no other help. Until society catches up, women will have to bear the brunt of this. Girls are asked to do more work around the house than boys. This practice delivers a strong message for both genders: girls learn that housework naturally falls under their domain and boys learn to depend on girls for chores as well.
According to American Time Use Survey (2015), On an average day, women spent more than twice as much time preparing food and drink and doing interior cleaning and over three times as much time doing laundry as did men. Men spent more than twice as much time doing activities related to lawn, garden and houseplants and doing interior and exterior maintenance, repairs and decoration as did women. On an average day, women spent almost an hour more doing household activities than did men. On an average day, 22 per cent of men reported doing housework-such as cleaning or doing laundry-compared with 50 per cent of women. Forty-three per cent of men did food preparation or cleanup activities versus 70 per cent of women.
Borah and Kalita (2011) reported that majority of the respondents used to perform the precooking activity like bringing firewood and cutting vegetables daily. Among the household activities, occasional activities such as pounding of rice, de-husking etc. required more time, followed by child care and cooking.
Methodology
For the purpose of study, Kurukshetra district was selected purposively. Two blocks from Kurukshetra district were randomly selected i.e. Thanesar and Ladwa block. Two villages from each block were selected randomly. The villages selected from Thanesar block were Jyotiser, Bhorsaida and from Ladwa block were Mehrabakali and Badarpur. From Kurukshetra district, 30 respondents from each village were selected randomly, thus making a total sample of 120 respondents from different socio-economic categories.
Results and Discussion
Socio-Personal Profile of the Respondents
Age: The data revealed that most of the respondents (60.8%) were in the middle age group, followed by younger (22.5%) and older age group (16.7%).
Education of respondents: Majority of women respondents (66.7%) were illiterate. Only 13.3 per cent of women respondents had obtained formal schooling up to primary level, followed by middle (11.7%) and high school (5.0%). Few respondents (only 3.3%) were graduates.
Family education status: Most of the families (76.7%) had low educational status, followed by high family educational status (16.6%). There were only few families (6.7%) who had medium educational status.
Caste: Less than half of the respondents (40.8%) belonged to lower caste, followed by middle caste (38.4%) and higher caste (20.8%).
Family type: Majority of the respondents (72.5%) had joint families and rest had nuclear families (27.5%).
Family size: More than one third of the respondents (40.0%) had four to six members in their families, followed by respondents who had more than six members in their families (37.5%) and remaining respondents had upto four members in their families (22.5%).
Social participation: As far as social participation is concerned, 2.5 per cent of respondents were found to be member of one organization i.e. Mahila Mandal.
Type of house: More than half of the respondents (66.7%) had mixed type house, followed by respondents (20.8%) who had pucca house and remaining (12.5%) had kutcha house.
Family occupation: The data regarding occupation depicted that 41.7 per cent of the respondents were cultivators, followed by agricultural labourers (40.0%). There were 15.8 per cent of respondents who had business as their occupation and remaining 2.5 per cent were in service

The data pertaining to time spent by rural women in different household activities in the present study have been incorporated in Table 1. It can be observed that in household activities viz., pre-cooking, cooking, post-cooking, washing clothes, cleaning of house, care of children, the mean score of women belonging to low socio-economic strata was higher than women in high, medium socio-economic strata with men having very low participation in activity like cleaning of house and care of children.
Women spend more of her time on the care of children; followed by cleaning of house, washing of clothes, post-cooking activities, cooking activities and pre-cooking activities. It may therefore, be inferred that women exclusively performed all the household tasks irrespective of socio-economic strata.

The data reported above clearly indicate that farm women used to do almost all of household work with very little participation of men, but they did not have adequate knowledge of modern drudgery reducing technology. There had been no deliberate attempts to give education about the modern technology to women. The data showed that the mean score of Ladwa block respondents was higher than mean score of respondents of Thanesar block.
Conclusions
Work inside the home with no other help and also work outside the home leads to mental as well physical strain of women. Moreover women had very little knowledge about the drudgery reducing technology so there is a need of programme which can increase their knowledge level regarding different techniques of drudgery reduction.
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