By Dina-Perla Portnaar

There’s unity in what women feel but have been conditioned to dismiss as personal failure, namely the ongoing exhaustion, which is political, structural and by design. Our work has never been counted properly, and it isn’t any different in Cyprus. Women should be treated much better in this male-centric country.

Consider the fact that women perform 75 per cent of all unpaid care work on the planet. Cooking, cleaning, childcare, elderly care and community maintenance: if that labour were paid at minimum wage, it would be worth $10.8 trillion a year! That’s more than three times the entire global tech industry. Yet it appears nowhere in GDP. It’s the largest economy in the world, and it’s invisible because it’s done by women. 

In the wealthiest countries on earth, the OECD nations, women still do two to three times more unpaid work than men every single day… Sociologist Arlie Hochschild named this phenomenon the Second Shift decades ago, and the data has only confirmed what she observed. Women who work full time come home and work again. Over a year, that adds up to one full extra month of 24 hour days compared to their male partners.

But this is only a part of the story. There’s the mental load, the invisible work of knowing what needs to happen. Not just doing the tasks, but managing the entire system. Research from Harvard shows that even with couples who believe they share equally, women carry most of the cognitive burden.

Anticipating, planning, deciding and monitoring: what food is running out, what the kids need for school tomorrow, whose birthday is coming up, what bills are due and so on. This is what researchers call contaminated leisure. The body stops, but the brain keeps running the checklist. Women are technically resting but mentally still working.

Then there’s the biological dimension that the Cypriot system refuses to acknowledge. The 40-hour, five day work week was designed for factory workers who were overwhelmingly male, and whose domestic labour was done by someone else at home. Men’s primary hormone, testosterone, resets every 24 hours. It rises in the morning, drops at night, and starts again. The nine to five was built for their bodies.

Women’s bodies work on a completely different cycle of four phases and four different brain states. Our brains in week one aren’t the same brains in week four. Neuroscience now confirms that hormone shifts across the menstrual cycle measurably affect how women perform cognitively.

The pill has suppressed women’s cycles completely. A liberation at what cost? The last 10 to 14 days of a woman’s cycle, when the body is asking for less output and more rest, have been taken away, hiding periods and taking pills for PMS. In other words, it’s male-centric progress.

The patriarchy isn’t kept alive by laws, politics, or violence alone, but by exhausted women. A world where women have true power cannot be built by women who are running on empty.

A tired woman cannot vote strategically or lead a community. Forty two percent of women report feeling burned out often or almost always, compared to 35 per cent of men.

Therefore, self-care is an act of political warfare. Rest is how we assert our humanity. Women, stop, say no, and commit to boundaries. Because compounded exhaustion and gender oppression work together, and more of us need to break the vicious cycle. Domestic labour continues to be used as a tool of control against women and the cornerstone of capitalism.

In Cyprus, women are more educated and visible than ever in academia, arts and business. Yet the island remains trapped in conservative roles, reinforced by the Church, and family traditions. Childcare is scarce and costly, parental leave for fathers remains culturally unused, and women carry the double burden of children and elderly care.

The gender pay gap persists, but the pension gap is even more devastating due to part-time work and career breaks. Yet Cyprus’ small size offers massive potential. Collective commitment and the inherited strength of foremothers can spark a revolution. Women can crack that patriarchal wall and build a future where care is valued, not exploited. And I bet that women can do so, while keeping the positives of conservative awareness alive.