Abstract
In many sub-Saharan African towns and cities, where women must compete for employment opportunities with their male counter-parts, domestic workers have become an important resource for enabling women to cope with the challenges of combining work and family responsibilities. Domestic workers (sometimes called house helps, house girls or house boys or house maids) are considerably cheaper than the costly formal childcare institutional arrangements. The duties and responsibilities of these domestic workers extend beyond the typical household work and childcare to include helping children with schoolwork, taking sick children to clinics for medical attention, and so on. Using Kenya as a case study, this chapter explores house helps and employer work dynamics in sub-Saharan Africa including the benefits and limitations of this type of domestic help. This chapter concludes by suggesting some possible solutions to improve the arrangements, and also sets a research agenda in this area.
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This has been described as "the unseen, yet unbreachable barrier that keeps minorities and women from rising to the upper rungs of the corporate ladder, regardless of their qualifications or achievements” (United States Department of Labor 1995, 4).
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Acknowledgments
I am sincerely grateful to Dr. Judith Martin of Hugh Downs School of Human Communication, Arizona State University, for her helpful comments in this book chapter.
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Muasya, G. (2014). The Role of House Helps in Work–Family Balance of Women Employed in the Formal Sector in Kenya. In: Mokomane, Z. (eds) Work–Family Interface in Sub-Saharan Africa. International Perspectives on Social Policy, Administration, and Practice. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01237-7_9
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