Gentlemen, did you understand that it was up to the lady to cook, clean the house or take care of the children? This is a judgment that could encourage you to participate more … The highest Portuguese court, the equivalent of our Court of Cassation, has ruled. She has just condemned a man to pay more than 60,000 euros to his ex-spouse, for the domestic work she had accomplished during nearly thirty years of cohabitation. A judgment passed almost unnoticed which is however nothing less than a legal recognition of this free work which still weighs, in large part, on women. Other signals from abroad confirm the trend.
Convictions in Portugal and China
On February 22, the Fangshan District People’s Court in Beijing also ordered a man to compensate his ex-wife to compensate for the domestic work she had done in the household during their life together. Married in 2015, the couple eventually divorced. As part of this procedure, the judgment is rendered for the benefit of Madame: the court thus ordered her ex-husband to pay her alimony (they have a common son in her care) of 2,000 yuan per month. (254 euros), as well as the sum of 50,000 yuan (6,340 euros) in compensation for the household chores she did when they lived together. Domestic work is therefore clearly distinguished here. This is the first judgment rendered in this type of case since the adoption, on January 1, 2021, of a law requiring the ex-spouse to compensate the years of domestic work performed by his partner.
The Portuguese conviction is all the more interesting as the Lusitanian couple was not married. At first instance, the court considered that there was no need to pay any sum whatsoever to the complainant (who claimed 240,000 euros). “Domestic work”, explained this tribunal, “not being legally exigible within the framework of a de facto union, its service as a contribution to the common economy is configured as the spontaneous fulfillment of a natural obligation”. The ex-companion appeals and wins. The proof has been shown that it was the ex-partner who did all the domestic chores. The compensation is however set at 60,782 euros, far from its claims.
The role of the compensatory allowance in France
To determine the value of domestic work, the Court of Appeal adopted as a criterion the national minimum wage, multiplied by 12 months, during the years of cohabitation. She then deducted a third of the total, allocating part of that amount to the woman’s expenses. Mr. in turn appealed to the Supremo Tribunal de Justiça … which confirmed his conviction. “Maybe if we start to touch the wallet, things will move faster,” reacts Caroline De Haas, co-founder of the feminist collective, Nous All.
# 8Mars2021
If we really want to fight economic violence against women, then the first step isThe financial recognition of free domestic work, carried out mainly by women!
Good progress in Portugal, with a judgment of 14/01/2021
– The Kind Of Capital (@genre_du) March 7, 2021
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In France, in the event of divorce, the compensatory allowance is supposed to erase the financial imbalances caused by the separation in the living conditions of the former spouses. However, it is not automatic (and only involves married couples). It even concerns only 19% of cases. Nine times out of ten it is granted to the wife, because it is more frequent that she slows down her activity to take care of the children or to follow her spouse. Statistically, the median benefit stands at 25,000 euros. According to a UN study, women today still perform, on average around the world, two and a half times more household chores than men. In Europe, the inequality in the distribution of household chores is high: according to a survey carried out in 2019 by the “Gender, sexuality and sexual health” pole of the IFOP for Consolab, 73% of French women believe that they do more. than their partner. The men in particular refuse to wash the clothes, to clean the toilets or to wash the floor. This feeling is in line with the figures of the latest INSEE “domestic and parental time for men and women” survey, dating from 2010, in which the distribution of tasks is respectively as follows: 28% VS 72%. The current health crisis, made up of confinements, curfews or teleworking to help curb the pandemic, has exacerbated these inequalities. In Germany, during the first confinement, faced with the closure of schools, nurseries, canteens … mothers of families even decided to calculate the cost of their domestic work, as well as parental, and send the bill to their region . That is, for the period from March 17 to May 15, an addition of around twenty thousand euros on average for each. Same approach initiated in June by the association Osez le feminisme !, which invited women to present their bill directly to the President of the Republic. “Isn’t it time, since the next world is looming, to do the accounts, to look at how many hours spent, of lost opportunities, or of interrupted careers because domestic and parental work is not only unevenly distributed but invisible, the majority of men overestimating their involvement and underestimating the work of their spouse? ”warned the association. In 2011, INSEE also estimated that this invisible work represented 33% of French GDP (60 billion hours worked per year). “And that’s a low estimate,” says Céline Piques, spokesperson for Dare Feminism !. This question is unthought of in economic policy. It is considered that it is a due on the part of women, to compensate for the closures of schools, nurseries or to stop for a sick child day, for the benefit of the whole family. More time to devote to his career, no mental load … it is much more comfortable for the spouse to advance in his career under these conditions. The woman is the only one for whom it is penalizing. There is the question of task sharing but also that of public service delegation. Too often, women end up taking on these tasks, also because of the lack of services and infrastructure, such as the lack of space in nurseries. ”The health crisis has exacerbated these inequalities
“Too often, women end up taking on these tasks also because of the lack of services and infrastructure”
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This is also a very bad calculation from an economic point of view, according to a 2019 study by the International Monetary Fund. By not fully involving women, the economy misallocates resources, as it restricts women to low-productivity household tasks instead of fully utilizing their market potential. Nor does it take advantage of the complementarity between women and men in the workplace. The result is lower productivity and economic growth. This gender gap in unpaid work is not only unfair: it is also clearly inefficient.
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