Antara/Aziz Munajar

Just like other people who develop a sense of community through food and eating together, Indonesians love good food and have many “collective eating” traditions. As an Indonesian living abroad, I often miss Indonesian food and occasionally drive for hours to have a proper Indonesian meal, though it’s often overpriced, even for the locals. The best home cooking for 20 years was served by my mother, which I didn’t have to pay for (though I had to wash the dishes afterward), but was it really free?

As they say, there’s no such thing as a free lunch: If we get it for free, someone else must pay for the costs. It can be real costs, which are tangible and intangible, and opportunity costs (what could have been done, if it did not happen). In the case of home cooking, how much do we spend to create such a meal? How much do we spend for chicken, spices, rice, oil and vegetables, for instance? And how about my mother’s time and energy?

Poverty studies have started to acknowledge time-use as part of endowment or resources, as humans’ inherited “commodity”. It means, no matter how rich or how poor you are, we are all entitled to 24 hours a day to do things we want or have to do. Nevertheless, social and cultural norms have pushed women and girls in particular to bear the cost of time disproportionately: to do cooking, unpaid domestic chores, caring jobs and more often for poor women, on top of their work responsibilities such as selling street food, becoming domestic workers, etc.

Several studies, including those by scholars, the World Bank, and United Nations agencies aim to understand how socioeconomic class and gender reshape a person’s ability to control their time use and its impact on social economic development and improvement of gender equality.

My study with the Individual Deprivation Measure in South Sulawesi in 2018 confirmed that both poor men and women have less control over their time, as the impact of their precarious work and mounting domestic and community-related responsibilities; but women are often burdened with more responsibilities, that cost their time-use more than men. Both in the urban and rural areas, women have to deal with various activities in their different capacities and identities: in the individual, domestic and community sphere.

For instance, in outskirt areas in South Sulawesi, women are required to help prepare social, religious and cultural events, including the meals, costumes and performances. This might seem trivial but this situation in medium to long term can hamper government efforts to reduce poverty and improve gender equality as the implication of marginalized groups’ inability to control their time.

Of course, there are positive implications of involving women in broader social events and giving them more responsibility to make decisions in the community and society level but we might also risk women’s wellbeing through taking out their limited leisure time and the opportunity costs attached to it.

For instance, promoting women to take leading roles in private or public sectors is noble, but maintaining norms of “the women’s job” to take care of the children, disabled family members or the elderly, can double-burden women — making such efforts ineffective to achieving gender equality.

This situation relates to the roles of norms, values, practices in shaping unequal power relations in society. Unfortunately, they are often reinforced by well-intended policy and development programs, for instance, the requirement and encouragement of women or mothers to attend family development sessions to be able to access cash transfers for the poor, which intends to empower women; or that women alone should be responsible in managing household money.

Back to daily meals; if it is not the mother, most likely it is the grandmother or female domestic worker who prepared them for us. Good for you if it was your father or other male relatives who prepared or helped prepare the meals for the whole family. Now imagine, if our lovely mothers could do less cooking, so she could do what she would love to do, such as taking a nap, meeting friends, or reading books. Wouldn’t that be nice and wouldn’t it look like the right thing to do? Cleaning the house together would also be great for family bonding, but less thinkable for households used to relying on the female members.

Reflecting on my own experience, my mother always seemed to have something in her hands and never sat down and relaxed, until after evening prayer. I thought it was normal, everyone’s mothers was just as busy as mine. And now as a mother myself, this thought disturbs me.

Distributing responsibilities and time allocation, both in the household, community or even societal level, may still be a long way as it involves changing social, cultural and religious norms, also requiring intergenerational political commitment and policy efforts. But at the very least, changing our individual values and promoting them to trigger broader change, can be done today.

Let’s cook a family meal together — that’s a small but meaningful step toward achieving gender equality and improving societies.

______________

Research officer at the Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University, Canberra

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