Actor Ryan Gosling was responsible for one of the more touching moments of Sunday’s Golden Globe awards when he used his acceptance speech to give a heartfelt tribute to his partner, actress Eva Mendes, for the work she did at home while he filmed the La La Land role that earned him the best actor honor.
“While I was singing and dancing and playing piano and having one of the best experiences I ever had on a film, my lady was raising our daughter, pregnant with our second, and trying to help her brother fight his battle with cancer. If she hadn’t have taken all that on so that I could have this experience, there would surely be someone else up here other than me today.”
“While I was singing and dancing and playing piano and having one of the best experiences I ever had on a film, my lady was raising our daughter, pregnant with our second, and trying to help her brother fight his battle with cancer. If she hadn’t have taken all that on so that I could have this experience, there would surely be someone else up here other than me today.”
His remarks were noteworthy because they acknowledge the unpaid, under-appreciated work—caring for children, ill relatives, or aging parents—that many women take on in addition to their professional jobs.
Globally, women spend an average of 4.5 hours daily on unpaid work—on child care, grocery shopping, and doing the laundry. That’s more than double the time men spend, according to OECD data. Unpaid work can be incredibly rewarding, but the time it consumes can be detrimental to women’s livelihoods. When women shrink their unpaid workload from five hours a day to three, their labor force participation increases 20%, according to the OECD.
Melinda Gates considers the unpaid work gap a “root inequality” and said last year that the Gates Foundation would work to close it. Technology and contraception can help alleviate women’s burden, but the evolution of cultural norms is just as important.
“We need to call work what it is—work—whether you do it at home or whether you do it out in the labor force,” she told The New York Times in February.
At least one Hollywood star was listening.