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Hello. Hello and welcome back to the bunker, your need to know for news and politics.

I'm Cocoa Khan and I want to know who cleans your toilet.

That's because despite the advancement in gender equality since the Second World War,

research shows that British women still do 60% more housework. Even in the famously more gender egalitarian nation of Sweden, home of their Latte Papa, women were averaging 45 more

minutes of chores each day. Despite more women in work and men taking up more of the

responsibilities of childcare than ever before, the housework gap still persists. Yet, a cruise around

Instagram might tell you that this is not a problem as clean influencers, so cleaning

influencers, redefine housework as an empowering act for women, a form of self-love,

a balm in our crazy times, and nothing like the torture that the famous feminist thinker,

Simone de Beauvoir described it as, she said futiles are more like the torture of Sisyphus than

housework with its endless reposition. To be honest, I think I kind of agree. But simply put,

housewives are back baby with a distinctly 2025 edge. So what is the appeal? Why now and why does it

matter? A new book, The Return of the Housewife, Why Women Are Still Cleaning Up, aims to answer

all these questions and its author joins us today.

Emma Casey, welcome to the bunker.

Thank you so much, Coco.

Thank you for having me.

Oh, no, my pleasure.

I love talking about cleaning it.

Genuinely, I actually did a piece a couple of years ago about the chores divide,

and we didn't really have an enormous amount of research or data

...