Husbands Create 7 Hours Of Extra Housework A Week For Their Wives, Says Study
In today's day and age, women are still doing the majority of the housework.
VGstockstudio | Shutterstock A marriage is more than just two people tying the knot and binding themselves to each other in the name of love. A true and successful marriage is a partnership between spouses; they assist and support each other through the bumps in the road, and take on different responsibilities for their new family.
The idea of the husband going to work and the wife staying home to take care of the house and kids is no longer the norm. Yes, it still happens, but most women choose a more traditional division of labor rather than feeling forced into it. That's a huge difference. Unfortunately, for women who are looking for a more equitable division of household chores, husbands seem to hinder rather than help in that department. According to research, these guys end up costing women hours more housework a week than they would be doing if they were only cleaning up after themselves.
A study found that husbands create 7 hours of extra housework for their wives every week.
Okay, sounds bad, but there are some bright spots in domestic labor distributions from the last few decades. Studies show that husbands are helping out more around the house. Compared to 1976, when women did 26 hours of work while men only did six, the percentage for women has lowered while men's has gone up. Great job, men!
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The bad news, however, is that wives are still doing the bulk of daily household chores. Something tells me this isn't all that surprising for the women reading. Even though things change, it takes a long time for long-held societal beliefs like traditional gender roles in marriage to change.
Women in general spend more time on housework than men, but married women spend the most time on cleaning tasks.
In a study by the University of Michigan, researchers found that women spend more hours doing housework than men, regardless of whether they're single or married, and no matter how many children they have. In the event of a marriage, they do at least seven more hours of work than their husbands.
Just take a moment to think about that. Seven more hours a week. That's like adding an entire workday to your week. I'm just exhausted thinking about it. A full workday of doing tasks you likely detest ... looking at you dishwasher filled with clean plates that I just do not want to empty.
“It’s a well-known pattern,” said ISR economist Frank Stafford, who directed the study. “There’s still a significant reallocation of labor that occurs at marriage — men tend to work more outside the home, while women take on more of the household labor. Certainly, there are all kinds of individual differences here, but in general, this is what happens after marriage. And the situation gets worse for women when they have children.”
Both husbands and wives spend time each day doing housework, but the chores themselves are gendered.
A 2023 report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics found that on an average day, 86% of women and 71% of men do chores, which the report specified as activities such as "housework, cooking, lawn care, or household management." The report also noted that on average, women spent 2.7 hours on these chores, while men spent 2.1 hours. Although not quite equal in division, those numbers don't seem so bad, but when you get down to the nitty gritty details, the specifics about what men and women are tasked with get a bit more unfair.
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Forty-eight percent of women filled those daily hours of housework, cleaning toilets, cooking, doing laundry, yeah, the worst of the worst chores. Only 22% of men engaged in those activities. Somehow, riding around on a mower listening to music on a warm summer afternoon sounds a whole lot better than scrubbing toilets. That's just my opinion, though.
Only a little under 8% of women do the "men's work" — lawn and garden work — compared to 11% of men. But guess who's doing the bulk of the childcare while the guys are pulling weeds, blowing leaves, or whatever? Yup, as the report noted, "On an average day, among adults living in households with children under age 6, women spent 1.2 hours providing physical care (such as bathing or feeding a child) to household children; by contrast, men spent 34 minutes providing physical care."
In a survey done by Pew Research Center, researchers found that among working parents, more fathers placed importance on having a full-time and high-paying job, while mothers were more concerned about flexible schedules to take care of the children.
As a woman, whether you work or stay home, if you slack on the housework, you're judged for it.
Society expects working moms to still do the bulk of the work around the house while judging stay-at-home moms for not helping with the expenses or not keeping the house tidy enough, or both. Meanwhile, if mom is away for the weekend and dad lets the house get destroyed, it's brushed off and joked about.
Furthermore, a Groupon survey revealed that out of 2,000 women in the U.K., two-thirds admitted that they continue to do more housework than necessary because "lack of confidence or cash" makes it difficult for them to break out of the working mom/stay-at-home mom stereotype.
So, husbands, when you complain about your wives nagging you, please just wash the dishes while she takes care of a million other things around the house. Or better yet, if you see a task that needs doing, take the initiative instead of waiting for her to ask for help. Trust us, she will appreciate that more. Remember, marriage is a partnership. You can't be in a partnership without taking on your own brunt of the work.
Caithlin Pena is an editor and former contributor for YourTango. Her work has been featured on Thought Catalog, Huffington Post, Yahoo, Psych Central, and BRIDES.
