Toronto, ON, – As the global household robot market continues to rise at a rapid rate – projected to grow from $6.78 billion in 2022 to $8.12 billion this year alone – you may be imagining a world in which the latest AI technology finally brings gender parity to traditional house work.
But according to gender equality researcher Keah Hansen, instead of helping to alleviate the fact that the undervalued, unpaid work of household chores and child care still rests largely on the shoulders of women, emerging house robots are actually reinforcing it.
“Robots are just technology, they don’t have a political agenda,” said Hansen, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication and Culture at York University. “They may be presented as holding great potential for advancing gender equality and promoting a more equitable distribution of chores, but my study indicates they actually contribute to inequity instead,” she said.
Hansen will be sharing findings from her research on how house robots extend inequities associated with domestic work as a featured speaker at the upcoming Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences (Congress 2023), Canada’s largest academic gathering and one of the most comprehensive in the world, taking place May 27 to June 2 at York University in Toronto.
Billed as a leading conference on the critical conversations of our time, Congress 2023 serves as a platform for the unveiling of thousands of research papers and presentations from social sciences and humanities experts worldwide. With more than 8,000 scholars, graduate students and practitioners expected to participate, the event focuses on reckoning with the past and reimagining the future, with the goal of inspiring ideas, dialogue and action that create a more diverse, sustainable, democratic and just society.
For the purposes of Hansen’s study, house robots range from Google Home, Amazon Alexa and Apple Siri to the Roomba floor vacuum to personal assistants like the Asus Zenbo, Amazon Astro or Ingen Dynamics Aido, with prices ranging from $100 to $1,500. She suggests that although such technologies are often marketed as removing the burden of housework, in reality they don’t provide freedom at all. Rather, they serve to underscore existing issues of underpaid, undervalued and marginalized domestic work.
First there’s the cost, which can be prohibitive for some families, similar to the way not everyone can afford to use a cleaning service. Second, house robots aren’t entirely free functioning, meaning someone has to program, operate and maintain them, and that task typically falls to the female or hired domestic worker in the house. And third, Hansen fears that the growing trend to de-gender technology, as a “quick fix”, will just mask the fact that the majority of unpaid and paid domestic work is still performed by women.
“House robots aren’t the answer to better pay and fair re-distribution of traditional women’s work,” said Hansen. “If anything, they’re obscuring the fact that there’s still work to be done to achieve equity.”
In her study, Hansen examines the historical Wages Against Housework movement in the ’70s and ’80s, which encouraged women to demand pay for ‘doing the dirty work’, which was later criticized by a prominent theorist, Angela Davis, who proposed that paying women wasn’t the answer, as previously thought. Whereas some women worked full-time and returned home to do domestic work, others, mostly women of colour, were already receiving marginalized wages for domestic work and it was found that the movement only served to reinforce those racial lines, creating further inequity. The solution for paying for a house robot, just like giving women wages, is similarly flawed, she says.
According to Oxfam, women and girls undertake more than three-quarters of unpaid care work in the world and account for two-thirds of the paid care workforce. In Canada, women spend nearly four hours per day on unpaid work as a primary activity, 1.5 hours more than men.
“That means, if you’re in your house, with your house robot, it’s still more likely that either the females in the household, or a hired domestic worker, will be the ones managing the robot and doing chores alongside it,” she said. “House robots are not a magic bullet. Despite what we imagine, women’s work continues to be undervalued.”
Organized by the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences in partnership with York University, Congress 2023 is sponsored by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Universities Canada, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, Mitacs, SAGE Publishing, and University Affairs.
Registration – which includes 200+ keynote and open Congress sessions, with a virtual attendance option for many presentations – is $55. Visit www.federationhss.ca/
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