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