Treasuring Career from Home: The Sustainability of Women Homeworkers and Household Divisions

Abstract

Women homeworkers in Indonesia also resulted in double role causes women to have double workload, namely the main work that makes money and household chores such as cleaning the house, cooking and so on. This is because women cannot leave their responsibilities in the household, yet they must continue to perform their main work. Accordingly, a discussion addressing the dual burden and mechanism of division of work between men and women in the household is needed. This research was conducted with a descriptive qualitative method aimed to describe a number of issues including how consensus was performed by women homeworkers in carrying out the division of work with men and the efforts of women homeworkers to do the division of work with their husbands in the domestic sphere. The research was conducted in Malang City, East Java, Indonesia with snowball sampling techniques on 37 women. Based on the research results, it was discovered that: 1) the division of work in the public and domestic spheres for women homeworkers was flexible; 2) Men more often did the heavy household chores such as washing and drying clothes, the division of work occurred at certain times such as in the morning; 3) Within the household, the division of work between men and women took place when the woman homeworkers’ main work piled up and could not be abandoned.