House husband, because home needs a CEO too

For years, "housewife" has sounded perfectly standard, but "house-husband" carries the discomfort of a WhatsApp group chat after you send a message to the wrong group. Why does house management have to be gendered?

Recently, this question has come under judicial scrutiny. The Madras High Court was deliberating on a case of divorce by mutual consent involving a doctor couple's family, and it observed that house-husbands should be accepted as part of the new normal so marriage and family can be preserved. The court added that since we have housewives, we ought to have house-husbands as well.

The statement is worth noting because it turns the traditional home paradigm on its head. Traditionally, the family has been organized hierarchically—the husband is the provider and the wife is the homemaker.

Now it seems that this scheme could be simplified to “whoever provides provides; whoever manages the home manages the home.” It can be either the wife or the husband, or both of them running a full-fledged joint home business with no HR at all.

After all, a house-husband does not just eat chips at home. He can be the CEO of Home Inc., running food, children, etc. Although job responsibilities may seem limited to certain functions, a worker’s time on the job can vary. Whether by luck or design, family members can issue daily performance reviews to people in their homes.

Worldwide, unpaid domestic work is becoming increasingly evident, as women and girls are estimated to do about 2.5 times as many hours of unpaid domestic work as men. Moreover, the International Labor Organization reported that in 2023, 748 million people were out of the labor force because of care obligations, of whom 708 million were women and another 40 million were men.

The numbers, obtained during the research, again show how clearly gender-categorized care obligations are, but also raise a crucial point: care obligations are work, even though they do not offer working attributes like salary, job identification, or annual bonuses.
India’s Time Use Research in 2024 showed similar results, confirming that among 15-59-year-olds, 92.9% of women engaged in unpaid domestic services at home, while only 30.4% of men did so in the same age group. Women performed unpaid services for 305 minutes a day, while men spent only 86 minutes.

Hence, normalization of the term house husband is very much needed. This does not mean every man needs to stay home. Nor does it imply that women must stop working professionally. Rather, it simply means gender should not determine how labor is divided at home.

The world is beginning to change, though. In the US, a Pew Research Center study found that 18% of stay-at-home parents in 2021 were fathers, compared with only 11% in 1989. Additionally, the father role has increased, with more families having stay-at-home parents during this period.

However, the language used around men at home and doing housework still needs some rebranding. When a woman takes care of her children, she is a mother. When a man does the same, he is often considered a babysitter. The question is: how can a father babysit his own children? It is similar to calling a CEO an occasional visitor in his own company.

When a husband cooks, cleans, and does laundry at home, people sometimes say he is helping his wife. Perhaps we should stop calling this "help". He does not help someone in their household – he is simply taking part in his own.

So the Madras High Court's observation enters a much wider conversation about care, gender roles, work-life balance, and the changing role of marriage in modern society. The breadwinner notion should not be the only way to structure families; people can arrange their lives around their needs, jobs, finances, and desires.

The only position that should remain unfilled is that of Chief Person Responsible for Finding the Remote Control, as no one admits to seeing it anywhere. Acceptance of the notion of a house husband means that it is widely accepted that contribution to a family is no less significant if a man makes it.

The family is not a corporation, and only the one bringing money home receives a title. Sometimes the most important thing for a family's success happens outside the workplace. Sometimes the most important meeting of the day is at the most unlikely venue – the dining table. And sometimes the person regulating the whole process is in shorts, holding the list of groceries, and shouting from the kitchen:
“Who ate the snacks?”