Is there some way to judge this from an interview when the applicant is also tied up so much in the evening with “family” tasks that they’ll never attend a tech talk after hours, and hasn’t had time for blogs or mailing lists for years.

The comments on Tom Waits using domestic work as a metaphor reminds me of a friend who had a favorite Marx quote, a warning against Utopian models, something like, “The recipes of a future society will be created in tomorrow’s kitchens.” (I haven’t been able to find the source.) More directly related to the topic at hand, I had a calculus instructor last semester who would use cooking metaphors to explain concepts, such as describing the process of using integrations by the disc method to determine the volume of a curved solid as being like Chinese cooking, in which you make fine slices.

The point being, there’s a wealth of concepts in domestic tasks — a great deal of valuable knowledge — and concepts discovered in one field of human endeavor often prove valuable in another.

I retract my earlier suggestion that an affluent woman is burdening the domestic worker by hiring her/him. However, the affluent woman is not being progressive or feminist by doing so.

In a world in which our individual acts don’t really make much of a difference, how is it worse to avoid hiring domestic labour? I mean, it unemploys someone who needs the job. On what should we then spend the money to fix that person’s problems?

I cleaned houses lo so many years ago. I had a good clientele and some people working for me, and did pretty well. The biggest downside was it was boring, my brain felt like it had died. But it allowed me to be independent and learn a lot of useful business skills.

Whoa, I’m not suggesting that people should discriminate against job applicants who are non-white and hire only white people who already have some money!

I’m just saying that hiring domestic workers does not solve the underlying problem of housework being considered a woman’s responsibility. Most women in the world, and most women in developed countries, cannot afford to hire someone else to do the housework. I can’t afford it. The problem of gendered division of labour is not solved just because a minority of women are rich enough to hire domestic workers.

That’s all.

Racial discrimination in employment is bad and illegal.