Men need to do more housework. But we all need to work less.

Care work is work. Full stop. And it needs to be more evenly distributed.

I can feel it when I’m vacuuming the house or driving my great aunt to buy checks from the bank she could’ve easily ordered online. A part of me hates doing “care work,” or tasks done in service of others. I want to be either doing “real work”— something creative or making money—or resting so I can do more “real work” in the future.

But I need to challenge this part of me. All men do. I’ve inherited a story about what it means to be a man—and what “work” really is. Care work is just “women’s work.” Trivial, done for the sake of “love” and “virtue,” not money. Something women are just “naturally” good at. Not “real work.”

That story is bullshit. It was literally invented during the early days of capitalism. As philosopher Nancy Fraser explains, “[Governments] largely looked on from the sidelines as industrialists dragooned newly proletarianized people, including women and children, into the factories and mines. The result was a crisis of [care work,] which prompted a public outcry and campaigns for ‘protective legislation.’”

In other words, the Elon Musks and Jeff Bezos’s of the early 1800s went a little too far in forcing working class women and children to work. Suddenly there was no one to cook meals, clean, and care at home. For people to be able to work long, grueling hours in a field or factory, someone had to take care of all the things that support that worker. Someone had to birth and care for the children who would eventually become workers. Someone had to make sure elderly, sick, or injured family members who couldn’t work were cared for. Because of patriarchy, that “job” fell to women. And the idea of “women’s work” was invented out of thin air.

Before capitalism, everyone shared in work and home duties to different degrees in different societies around the world. Care work wasn’t necessarily “trivial,” lesser than the “real work” of hunting or working in the fields. It wasn’t always fairly distributed, but compared to now, work wasn’t so gender specific. It was handled by the community as a whole. Just a few examples: As much as 50 percent of prehistoric humans who were big game hunters are estimated to have been female. Women in the indigenous Iroquois society of eastern North America owned and worked the land and shared political power with men. Peasant women in medieval European worked alongside men doing almost exactly the same jobs.

“Women’s work”

My point is the reaction I have to cleaning the house or caring for my great aunt is socialized. Care work, our society tells us, is “women’s work” and therefore insignificant, easy, not deserving of pay. Policies for things like paid parental leave and universal childcare are barely considered or even talked about. Care work is taken for granted, which means too much of it falls to women. Research shows that mothers spend more combined time than fathers working, doing household labor, and caring for children. Most working mothers are pulling a “second shift” at home, but not getting paid for it. And then that second shift is ignored or outright made fun of.

Gavin McInnes, founder of the white nationalist group the Proud Boys, said the quiet part loud in a 2015 Fox News rant: “Women earn less in America because they choose to. They would rather go to their daughter’s piano recital than stay all night at work working on a proposal. Their less ambitious. This is God’s way, nature’s way of that women should be home with the kids.”

Care work for all

The reality is care work is work. Full stop. As a new therapist, helping clients is the most emotionally draining work I’ve ever done. And I’ve worked as a proposal manager, staying up all night at work on proposals. I’ve been a communications director in high pressure situations with the media. I’ve worked 12-hour days in a factory cutting and packing metal. I can’t imagine doing emotional work with kids or my great aunt day in and day out and being called “less ambitious.” Women—and teachers, nurses, and all workers doing care work and not being paid enough for it—should be enraged.

What men in relationships need to do is check in with our partner about the distribution of care work. We need to push through the discomfort of playing with kids or helping elderly family members and feeling like it’s a waste of time. We need to recognize there’s value in caring for others—not just because it’s hard work, but because it’s necessary and part of the human experience. But we also need to join with demands for policies like shorter work weeks that make care work easier for everyone, so that everyone can take part in it, and no one—regardless of gender—is overworked, exhausted, and burned out.