Women Still Do Most of the Housework. Can a Robot Help?

The robots are coming for my job, and I could not be more excited. But wait, you might be thinking, doesn’t my job (editor, writer, email etiquette practitioner) require the kind of creativity and tact that would make it impervious to the wave of automation that’s wiped out more than half a million jobs since 1990?

Let me clarify. I’m not talking about the job that begins at 9ish in the morning, and ends (approximately) when I leave the office or power down my phone. I’m talking about the grind that starts at 6 a.m., kicks up again at 6 p.m., goes into the wee hours of the night, infects my every waking moment, and sometimes slips into my dreams. And did I mention there’s no overtime, weekends, sick leave, or other benefits (unless you count eternal love and a sense that there’s purpose in the world)? I’m speaking, of course, of running a household that includes several small humans. Sure, parenting is empathy and imagination and many things that perhaps machines are not. (Though don’t be too quick to count them out; they just might be taking care of your grandparents—if not your kids—in some not-so-distant future.) But doing the cleaning, cooking, and organizing isn’t rocket science—it might just be robotics.

Or at least this was the hope I held out when I read Anders Sandberg, of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, tell Andrés Oppenheimer for his new book, The Robots Are Coming!: The Future of Jobs in the Age of Automation, “If your job can be easily explained, it can be automated.” How to push a vacuum across the floor, how to order the diapers, how to set the thermostat—I was pretty sure these things could be easily explained. And it was hope that I felt, because for all the cries that automation will destroy the job market as we know it, those cries don’t seem to take into account all the women who might be willing—desperate!—to give up the jobs that they’re doing after hours and on the weekends. Not to discount the men who are doing their fair share in the home, but—as the studies show—women, even when they are also working outside the home, are still doing more within it. If the dishwasher and the washing machine liberated our grandmothers, what would liberate me? Or, to put it another way, if my husband and I couldn’t each have a wife, couldn’t we at least have a Rosey the Robot Maid?

In order to bring about this futuristic fantasy, I needed to see what was out there. There is the Amazon Echo or Google Home, able to receive commands and execute a limited range of actions having mostly to do with manipulating data and your credit cards. There’s a robot lawnmower that will trim your lawn, if you’re not a stickler for precision. Then there are a handful of laundry-related devices: the Swash, a time-saving not-quite-washer advertised to take your clothes from “in between to looking clean” in ten minutes; or the Foldimate,
a clothing-folding device that got mainly positive reviews at CES this year. And then there’s the rumored Amazon project, the Vesta, reported to be a kind of “mobile Alexa,” able to traverse the home like a self-driving, miniature car. When I reached out to Amazon for comment they issued an, um, robotic response: “We don’t comment on rumors and speculation.”

All of these devices have the added benefit of entertaining your children for a limited amount of time, but there are some items that seem more promising than others in that arena: Sony’s aibo robot dog, which is smart enough to learn which family members are particularly attentive and develop a special bond with them, can be yours for a cool $2,899.99, or, you know, a lot more than you’d probably pay for a purebred labradoodle. (If the tapping of aibo’s feet begins to annoy you, you can purchase extra “paw pads” to muffle the sounds. Or turn it off.) And then there are the devices that extend our data-driven life to our children's earliest moments. There’s the snoo, the crib that performs a function usually executed with human arms by rocking your baby to sleep, and monitors their sleep cycles. (I’m a fan.) Then there’s the Miku, the baby monitor that allows parents to “read and track in real-time from any mobile device the breathing and sleeping patterns of your baby without wires or wearables,” for, you know, those parents who are super chill, or the BlueSmart mia, an “intelligent baby bottle” that measures things like temperature and bottle-feeding angle.

Not only will all these things help you with discrete tasks, they will be linked and interconnected by the miracle of 5G, which will essentially allow every device that is plugged in to be “enabled by AI or data management of one kind or another,” says James Adams, author of Artificial Intelligence: Confronting the Revolution. “You’ll be able to speak to your car while you’re driving it, and tell it you want the vacuum turned on in your house. Your fridge will tell you that you’re running out of milk, or it will go ahead and order it for you,” says Adams.

All of this intrusion was beginning to sound like a bit of a terror. I wanted a subtle, pint-size helper, not a creepy, omnipresent big brother, so I decided to start with the robotic vacuum, specifically Ecovacs’ DEEBOT OZMO 930. The Deebot is actually more than a vacuum: it’s a mop, a computer, a mapping device, a conversationalist, and possibly a spy. Will it help you, with its smart sensors designed to chart and register the gradations of your floor and the corners of your couches, or will it sell a floor plan of your apartment to the Russians? Who cares! I fired it up one harried Saturday afternoon and witnessed the magic unfold. My trio of monsters under the age of six gathered round the creature—they named it Pookie, a reassuring anthropomorphizing instinct, I thought—and watched it chart a crooked path back and forth across the living room. Some combination of fear and fascination kept them enthralled for the next 11 minutes or so. “I am suspended,” the Deebot chided when a handsy child decided to disrupt its cycle. And then the sweetest sound of all: “cleaning cycle complete.” I had assumed our floors were fairly tidy, so I was appalled when the machine also announced that the dust trap was full. How had we been living with all this filth?

Which brings me to the rub of automation. Maintaining a house while caring for children is an exercise in winnowing down what must be done. Laundry—yes. Ironing—never. But what if there was a machine that did it for you? Would you—space allowing—get an ironing robot in pursuit of some more perfect vision of a wrinkle-free self? And was that vision what I even wanted, or was it a figment of capitalism, convincing me the solution was just an Alexa-enabled order away? As the devices I was investigating began to arrive, I started to resent the crowding of appliances that looked as though they should be mouldering in a Staples warehouse, not cluttering up my home. The new robotic age does not keep a Kondo’d profile.

And what about the gender inequality that my little experiment was meant to address? “More automation could mean more equality,” says Brown University economics professor Emily Oster, and author of the new book Cribsheet*: *A Data-Driven guide to Better, More Relaxed Parenting from Birth to Preschool; “although I think it's a little complicated whether it will change the inequality as opposed to just the amount. That is, women may still do two or three times as much work, just a smaller total amount.” As she pointed out, there’s quite a bit of disagreement among economists as to whether these kinds of appliances actually save labor or time. In fact, according to one 2004 study, "technology rarely reduces women's unpaid working time and even, paradoxically, produces some increases in domestic labour.” Sadder yet, “the domestic division of labour by gender remains remarkably resistant to technological innovation.” Maybe the means to a more equitable division of labor in my house is just to keep a tally of who does what and for how long, and hold ourselves accountable to our progressive vision of ourselves. Surely there's an app for that?

Originally Appeared on Vogue