What Every Woman Must Know: Parenting and Working Should Never Be The Death of Women

As a mother, journalist Lucy Denyer wakes up around 6.45am on Fridays, mops up a leaking freezer, prepares breakfast and dresses herself and her two small children, drops one at school for a sports club and gets to the office at 8.30am. Lucy works 11.5 hours a day, comes home, sorts loads of laundry, prepares dinner, and the list goes on before going to bed. But does she want any reward, a medal perhaps?

"No, I don't want a medal - or to pretend that my day was harder than that of loads of other parents," Denyer said. "But nor do I want to hear that this is the "price I have to pay for having it all". Because let's be frank, that's not having it all. That's having a life stretched to breaking point, where everything suffers because you're so goddamned knackered all the time," she added.

If you are a woman, it turns out it really can kill you. Women who work 60 hours per week or more over 30 years actually triple their risk of cancer, heart trouble, diabetes, and arthritis according to a report on The Ohio State University. At just 40 hours, the risk begins to climb, and takes a decidedly bad turn over 50. On the other hand, men can naturally get healthier the longer they work. Researchers believe that this is due to the fact that women face additional pressure in their home lives.

For couples, most especially those with kids, it is the woman who usually does nearly all domestic chores. A research of twenty-two developing nations revealed that men do thirty-four minutes of housework and cooking for every female hour, and provide twenty-four minutes of childcare to a woman's hour as cited on Telegraph. The 15th worst is the UK pay gap at 17.4%. This means that women are not only literally killing themselves working, but also doing it on the cheap.

This system is obviously not working for anybody, for both men and women, as nobody wants his wife/colleague or 50 of the population thrombo-ing out because of the way society is structured. Thus, there is really a need to put a stop dismissing all this stuff as merely a "women's issue" and begin talking about it as a collective problem, a dilemma that must be immediately addressed.

So how exactly do we do this? Not by some kind of traditional domestic revolution in which women are pushed back permanently into the home. Most women prefer to work and love their jobs. They have worked hard and long to get them. And working women don't need to apologize for doing work and domestic life at the same time. A number of women also need to work, practically speaking.

A more shared approach to everything is quite necessary. Because having children is a joint decision, shifting of all the responsibility onto the mother when the baby is born should be imposed. Men have to step up to the plate by taking that shared parental leave, discussing who will work part-time and joining in the domestic drudgery.

However, women should also stop telling men that they are rather useless at fathering; Women should start encouraging their husbands to see themselves as homemakers too. And perhaps, both can leave the dishes until the morning.