What would happen if all the women were to disappear from a town, leaving the
men to not only work, but also to take care of the family and the
home? That is what the BBC plans to find out in this small Canadian town.

Women preparing to leave…

"It will be a disaster, a
complete disaster," said Kelly Weatherly, who was sent off for a week at a
resort, along with almost all the women in her community of 760, leaving the
town and its children in the hands of the men. The exodus was part of a social
experiment filmed for Canada’s national broadcaster, the

CBC

.
Touted as an exploration of gender issues in contemporary Canadian culture, ‘The
Week the Women Went’ is based on a BBC program by the same
name.

Recent government
statistics show that 70% of Canadian households are run by women. The majority
of these women also hold full-time jobs.

In Hardisty, an oil-patch town
in the prairie province of Alberta where the program was shot, many of the men
work away from home for days at a time. "They don’t get to hang out with daddy,"
said stay-at-home mother Heather Miller of her two young sons in the first
episode. "I don’t even know if he’s had them for a whole
day."

While Miller worried
about her husband Dustin’s ability to cope without her, he didn’t share her
concern. "Two people to take care of, both under the age of five," he said. "How
hard can it be?" Dustin Miller’s comments may come off as misguided, but for
some of the local men good planning made the process easy. "It wasn’t that much
of an ordeal," said town administrator, and father of three, Tony Kulbisky. "We
just pre-planned everything, or tried to be as organized as we could
be."

For one commitment phobic
man, who after ten years together, and three children, was still refusing to
marry his girlfriend, the time apart prompted him to plan a surprise wedding.

Via Times of India