A high court verdict noting that 'homemaker' is gender-neutral counters a deep prejudice that domestic labour is women's duty rather than just another form of workWhen Kartik Nair, 39, a former marketing manager in Bengaluru, quit his job after the birth of his second child, the financial logic seemed straightforward. His wife, an investment banker, earns considerably more, while childcare for two young children is expensive and difficult to manage around both their schedules.
What surprises him is how frequently he has to explain the decision. “If my wife says she is taking care of the children, nobody asks what she does all day,” he says. “When I say it, people immediately ask when I am going back to work.”A Madras High Court judgment reported last week puts that discomfort into unusually direct language. While dissolving the marriage of a doctor couple, a bench of Justices G.R.
Swaminathan and M.D. Sumathi said the term “homemaker” is gender-neutral and observed that if there are housewives, then there can also be house husbands. “Let this become a new normal,” the court said.The case involves two doctors.
While the husband pursues advanced qualifications in cardiology, it is mostly the wife who raises their two children. Recognising the economic value of her domestic contribution, the bench noted that someone’s career progression could depend heavily on the spouse taking on unpaid family work.The judgment touches on a larger contradiction in Indian households.
Women’s participation in paid employment is changing, but domestic work remains heavily gendered. India’s Time Use Survey 2024 shows that women participating in unpaid domestic work spend an average of 289 minutes a day on it, compared with 88 minutes for men.
Women also spend considerably more time on unpaid caregiving. For Priyanka Shah (name changed), 41, a corporate lawyer in Mumbai, having her husband leave full-time employment when their daughter was three made her own career easier.
Yet she finds that relatives often describe him as “between jobs” rather than as a homemaker. “Nobody wants to call what he is doing work,” she says. “But I can work late because he is doing school runs, cooking, doctors’ appointments and everything else.”That difference in language points to a deeper issue. Indian society still ties masculinity closely to earning.
A man without paid employment can therefore face questions not only about money, but also about status, ambition and authority within the family.Researchers studying stay-at-home fathers in urban India also examine how men negotiate masculinity when they move away from the traditional breadwinner role. The resistance often comes from extended families as much as from the couple themselves.
A couple may privately decide that the higher earner should remain in the workforce, while parents and relatives still interpret a man staying home as unemployment and a woman financially supporting the family as an inversion of the expected order.The Madras High Court did not create a new legal category of “house husband”. Its observations arose from a matrimonial dispute, but gave judicial recognition to a question many dual-career couples increasingly confront: if unpaid domestic work has economic value when women perform it, why should that value disappear when the person doing it is a man?Subscribe to India Today Magazine- Ends