Why do women still do more housework?
Here’s a stat to get you fired up on a Monday: The more money a woman earns, the less her *partner will contribute to the housework.
Yes, you read that correctly.
*in a heterosexual partnership or marriage.
Men, while they’re more likely than ever to embrace the idea of gender equality, are still slackers when it comes to household work, according to a new poll.
Multiple studies have documented men’s changing attitudes toward women in recent years: There is almost universal support for women to pursue careers and political office, which is great considering over the last half-century, across the developed world, more and more women have gone to work, the gender pay gap has been steadily (slowly) narrowing, and fathers have spent more and more time with their children. But the “housework gap” largely stopped narrowing in the 1980s. Yes, 3 decades ago. Men, it seems, conceded that they should be doing more than before – but then, having half-heartedly vacuumed the living room and passed a dampened cloth over the dining table, concluded that it was time for a nice sit-down (or is that just me?).
Dig further into the numbers, and things look worse: according to some studies, in heterosexual households where the woman is the main breadwinner, the more she earns, the less her partner will contribute to the housework. And, of course, to the extent that women scale back their career ambitions in order to focus on domestic matters – childcare plus housework – this inequality at home perpetuates inequality at work. (“It’s not a glass ceiling, it’s a sticky floor,” to quote Rebecca Shambaugh).
Meanwhile, everywhere, men get special credit for the chores they do, because their contribution gets assessed at “the going rate”, as the sociologist Arlie Hochschild put it in her 1989 book The Second Shift: if a man does a bit more than the notional average man in his community, he’s viewed as exceptionally helpful.
Perhaps a reason why; the anecdotal evidence suggests that, generally speaking, men genuinely don’t care as much as women about a clean and tidy home. “
When’s it going to change?
It will change when it’s not just women who want it to change.
Men will have to buy in and step it up at home. Now more than even with lots of men and women working from home and employers offering more work / family balance we should look to offering paid family leave, and don’t get me started on the notion of public preschool. I personally believe that if you are in the NFP or Charity Business you should have free, public daycare. Employers will need to stop expecting employees, especially men, to work at all hours.
