Please note the third part of an essay at POLITICS .

The Tea Turned Cold in the Cup,

or, Why Women’s Work is No Work

III.

The notion that women are paid less although they work as much and as hard is erroneous: women are paid less although they work more and harder than men. In fact, women are paid less because they work more than men.

If you take into account that women spend much of their time and energy on domestic chores, it stands to reason that they have less space left for their education, training, development, paid and unpaid work, and are less likely to be promoted.

You wonder why someone devotes an essay to something as humble as cleaning toilets or filling washing-machines, and why this should be a political issue. Well, it is a question of principle but also a question of scale.

If you work out that a woman’s additional labour – by comparison to the life partner or other male peers – may well amount to 1,000 hours per year, you reach the figure of 10,000 hours rather soon across a lifetime. This is supposedly sufficient to become a veritable expert or great artist; and this is cut out of women’s lives, with no one noticing a hole as big as the Bermuda Triangle.

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Photograph: Christina Egan © 2013.