In Norway the more children there are in a family, the less total time is spent with them by the father. In Canada the more children in the family, the more time the man spends watching television. In the U.S. the income gap between full-time working men and women has not narrowed. Only one working woman in four earns a wage high enough to support herself and her family. Nearly all Russian women work full time, many in traditional male occupations, from heavy construction to high bureaucracy.
Soviet men do almost no cooking, cleaning, laundry, shopping or child care.
Doctors in the Soviet Union are among the most poorly paid and least respected workers, and most of them are women. These figures make me sad. They say not only that the power relationships between men and women are still badly skewed, but also that industrialized society has not yet learned to value the tasks of cleaning, cooking, child care, the nurturing of people and the maintenance of homes. I suppose everyone grows up as I did, certain that there is hardly a worse way to spend your time than doing dishes or scrubbing floors. Being forced as a child to do these things doesn't help.