Maydee project
by Julie Hebting
Maydee arose from my personal experience -- the difficulties I had to balance my career and family life after the birth of my child -- and from the observation that women still do a majority of housework and childcare. Maydée is a non-profit project which aims to advance gender equality. We focus on 3 main
actions : enabling and fostering a more equal distribution of domestic work within
households, raising awareness of the impact of an unequal distribution of domestic work,
and raising awareness of gender stereotypes.
Maydee arose from my personal experience -- the difficulties I had to balance my career and
family life after the birth of my child -- and from the observation that women still do a
majority of housework and childcare. 71% of the housework is still managed by women in
France1. We might think that outsourcing is a solution, however studies2 show that
employing cleaners only relocalises the problem. In fact, it reduces the amount of housework
for women, nevertheless the remaining part and its management will be even more
unequally distributed between men and women. This gender division of the work affects all
women, in most OECD countries, and these inequalities have great consequences on
women’s careers, economic independence and health. According to an OECD study3, a
better gender balance in unpaid work correlates with greater equality in labour market. This
strenghtens our conviction that housework isn’t a non-issue. If we want to advance gender
equality, we have to change the bias we have about men and women’s roles, and to raise
awareness of the impact of an unequal distribution of domestic work. Consequently, we
created Maydee app, a Progressive Web App which facilitates the equal distribution of
domestic work. Maydee app enables users to measure, record and compare the time they
dedicated to housework. This tool will allow couples to measure how equal or unequal their
division of housework is and help them to better share the load. We are also developing
cleaning tutorials for men at the moment.
Stay in touch, follow us (@Maydeapp) on twitter, Facebook or Instagram.
1 Source : INSEE "Le temps domestique et parental des hommes et des femmes : quels facteurs
d'évolutions en 25 ans ?" Clara Champagne, Ariane Pailhé et Anne Solaz - Économie et Statistique
No 478-479-480
2 Source : François-Xavier Devetter, Sandrine Rousseau, 2011. "Du balai. Essai sur le ménage à domicile et le retour de la domesticité"
3 Source : OECD (2017), The Pursuit of Gender Equality: An Uphill Battle, OECD Publishing, Paris.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264281318-en |