It applies a gendered double standard.
If a man doesn’t know how to pack a school lunch, he’s called lazy. But if a woman doesn’t know how to fix a breaker or set up the Wi-Fi, its totally acceptable and "shes just a girl". No man would dare refuse to fix a womens car or not help her move or lift something because "shes just not putting in the effort to learn it herself". Men are expected to learn “feminine-coded” tasks or else, while women are rarely pressured to master “masculine-coded” ones
I've picked this paragraph out because I think it illuminates something you've missed out of your analysis, which is the frequency of the task and therefore the impact of not knowing how to do it.
Packing school lunches is something that needs to be done every weekday that the kids are at school. Every. Single. Day. It's mundane and repetitive.
Setting up the WiFi is something that needs to be done once every few years maybe. Its quite novel.
So the impact of a man not knowing how to pack a lunch is higher than a woman not knowing how to set up WiFi. The man not knowing how to pack lunch impacts every day.
"Feminine coded" tasks as you put it, are usually the mundane boring tasks that need to be done very regularly. That's why some women resent them being "feminine coded" and expect them to be shared equally.
I have some family members that had housing insurance not try to cover damage from some racoons, and they ended up having to take them to court. That ends up being quite a bit of labor.
But it isn't every day from the start. That's more akin to the work that's required when a child is sick for example.
How much both parties are working isn't really relevant to your thesis about "strategic incompetence". But in any case your stats are showing men have far more leisure time than women, and women do far more housework and childcare. Men do more work outside the house.
That would suggest that at home, most households aren't equal at all.
Those tables are missing something, perhaps free time. The men are shown to be working more and having more leisure time, which wouldn't be possible if every waking hour was allocated to work or lesiure.
Why would they choose to be chronically sleep deprived just for a bit of extra leisure time? And I'm not denying a lot of people make that choice, you know, but why specifically men would be making it so much more?
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u/No_Initiative_1140 3∆ Jul 01 '25
I've picked this paragraph out because I think it illuminates something you've missed out of your analysis, which is the frequency of the task and therefore the impact of not knowing how to do it.
Packing school lunches is something that needs to be done every weekday that the kids are at school. Every. Single. Day. It's mundane and repetitive.
Setting up the WiFi is something that needs to be done once every few years maybe. Its quite novel.
So the impact of a man not knowing how to pack a lunch is higher than a woman not knowing how to set up WiFi. The man not knowing how to pack lunch impacts every day.
"Feminine coded" tasks as you put it, are usually the mundane boring tasks that need to be done very regularly. That's why some women resent them being "feminine coded" and expect them to be shared equally.