Among dual-career couples, women do more housework – even when they earn more money than their partners. Picture: John Hogg/ANA Pics
By Sarah Green Carmichael
Women spend 47 minutes more on housework on average than men each day, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the US.
That adds up to roughly 5½ hours each week, and that's not including childcare, grocery shopping or errands, which the BLS classifies in other categories and of which women also do far more.
Here's another way to think about it: To equalise the load, women would have to stop doing housework on August 29 for the rest of the year.
Maybe they should. We have Equal Pay Day every spring to bring attention to the additional months women would need to work to catch up to men's earning power. I suggest we adopt Equal Housework Day every August to underline the extra labour women put in at home.
The gender gap in housework persists regardless of a couple's other commitments. Among dual-career couples, women do more housework – even when they earn more money than their partners.
Among retired people, women do more housework. Among non-employed men and women of prime working age, men spend the lion's share of their waking hours watching TV. Women spend it on housework.
It isn't as if men don't have time to cook or clean. The average man has about 40 minutes more daily leisure than the average woman. Among married parents who both work full time – where time to rest is tight, and the housework gap shrinks to about 30 minutes – the husbands take even more leisure than their wives: 44 minutes more every day.
The result is that in almost every coupled household, women do more and have less time to recover. Women consistently report higher rates of burnout, stress, depression, anxiety and insomnia. The housework gap is surely not the only reason, but it can't help.
One survey from March, led by advertising agency Berlin Cameron and author Eve Rodsky, asked respondents what single thing their spouse or partner could do to lower their stress levels.
The most common response from women: "Help around the house more." Yet when men were asked what one thing their wives could do to lower their stress levels, their most common response was "Nothing, I'm happy with the way things are."
I don't think these men are saying "I'm happy my wife is so burnt out." But they might not be aware of the stress their partners are feeling, and of their own, passive role in fuelling it.
Multiple studies suggest that men consistently overrate their own household contributions. That obliviousness is a problem that Equal Housework Day could help solve.
One challenge is that the activities men do tend to be less frequent and more deferrable: yard work, home repairs, car maintenance…
It's women who disproportionately end up with the daily grind of cooking, cleaning and laundry.
As consultant Kate Mangino points out in her new book, "Equal Partners", one reason women prioritise flexibility at work – and often accept lower salaries as a result – is because their unpaid work is inflexible. The gutters can wait; dinner can't.
To close the housework gap, men don't need to spend more time mowing the lawn; they need to start doing some of the tasks their female partners do every morning and every night.
That might be awkward, especially at first; our cultural associations about who does what are so strong that we often, mistakenly, think that "she's better at" tasks like cleaning.
A wife might forbid her husband from entering the laundry room, the way he tells her to keep her hands off the cordless drill. But at best, female skill is the result of years of doing a task over and over.
Most people don't think of their own households as reproducing sexist societal dynamics, research by Allison Daminger, a sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has shown.
That would be too painful. Instead, we find ways to rationalise the housework disparity, making excuses like "She's a perfectionist" and "He's laid-back."
This isn't really true. As Daminger points out, some men who claim they aren't detail-oriented hold jobs as project managers or surgeons.
Equal Housework Day would help by admitting that the housework gap is a cultural problem that's bigger than any one couple.
And just as we can't expect the gender pay gap to go away by getting women to "negotiate better" with their bosses, it shouldn't be down to individual wives to solve the housework gap by "negotiating better" with their husbands.
But solving it wouldn't take much: Men have 40 minutes more a day of leisure time than women do; women do 47 more minutes of housework than men.
Men could do just 23 minutes more of housework each day and nearly wipe out the housework gap.
The alternative is for women to exercise the nuclear option: Leave the house messy and the fridge empty from now until 2023.
* Sarah Green Carmichael is a Bloomberg Opinion editor.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.