BidMyCleaning Banter – Posts from your online marketplace for cleaning services

Female Executives Face Too Many Demands

Posted by Candice on October 27, 2009 at 22:27 pm

The Corporate Ladder and House Cleaning Too

The work day begins at home with getting the kids up and ready for school, preparing breakfast and lunches – all before heading into the office for a full day. Most female executives are likely to work beyond 5pm and then when they do get home there is dinner to be prepared, laundry to do, house cleaning to fit in somehow. And that’s in between supervising homework, getting the children bathed and into bed. This is easily another three to four hours of work after the workday.

For female executives, the fact that they carry a disproportionate share of the housework can prove to be a handicap in the workplace. Too many demands on their time can lead to lower productivity or just plain burnout. While she may be able to juggle all these responsibilities for a time, it will eventually get to be too much and the ability to perform all the tasks as well as she’d like may be compromised. Doing the housework has typically been associated with the female gender role and it seems women have been more successful at overcoming gender roles by breaking through the glass ceiling in the workplace than they have been at shedding their gender roles in the home.

There are a limited number of choices when it comes to managing all the household responsibilities:

- Share the workload more equally with spouse
- Lower their housekeeping standards
- Learn new housekeeping efficiencies
- Enlist help from other family members
- Hire outside help

Jack Canfield author of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series has said, “most female executives spend too much time running their household, when they could easily delegate this task to a cleaning service…freeing themselves to focus on their career or spend more time with their family.” Research from 2005 showed that the decision to hire outside help did not depend on how much the husband earned but rather correlated with the female executive’s income with those who earned a higher income more likely to hire outside help.

Sometimes hiring outside help is delayed because the task in itself can become quite time consuming. Finding and vetting a cleaning service, getting bids and scheduling the service can seem like just one more ‘to do’ on an already full schedule. At Bidmycleaning.com the goal is to make this as fast and efficient as possible. There is also no requirement to complete this task during business hours as the site is available 24/7. Finding and scheduling house cleaning services can be accomplished in just a few minutes. The site also makes management of the service schedule simple because it can all be done online.