Conventional wisdom has long held that while “a man must toil from sun to sun, a woman’s work is never done.” And indeed, recent studies show that while women are now the primary breadwinners in 37% of households with children, on average women still do three times more housework than men.
No one knows exactly why women carry most of the load at home even when they also carry most of the burden of making a living. Is it something about men and women in general that leads to this or is it just that social expectations towards women are still based on reruns of Leave It To Beaver?
To find out researchers are studying gay and lesbian couples, and though such marriages are fairly new, research indicates that housework, cooking and childcare are much more evenly distributed in gay – and especially in lesbian – relationships.
In an article in this month’s issue of The Atlantic magazine author Liz Mundy reports that women married to (or in a committed relationship with) another woman tend to divide everything as evenly as possible, even keeping loose change in “Hers & Hers” jars that are equal to the penny. Gay men are not as careful about maintaining marriage equality but do share chores much more than men married to women do. Several gay men who had previously been married to women admitted that they hadn’t done near as much around the house or with the kids during those years (which seemed to infuriate the women researchers mentioned in the article).
So it appears that it isn’t necessarily men’s and women’s natures that lead to the overburdening of heterosexual wives so much as deeply embedded expectations of what husbands and wives should do, even when the wife is defying expectations by being the primary breadwinner.
When my wife Lori and I were married in 1985 she taught school and I was a grain farmer. Since this situation left me at home during the winter I made myself do some things around the house, like vacuuming and dishes. I even learned how to cook so that once or twice a week I could help out that way. Once we had kids I realized I’d better learn to change diapers and do laundry but stopped cooking and did hardly anything when Lori was home on weekends.
Yes, ladies, I know this was because I’m a typical male chauvinist, but it was also because Lori did a much better job of all these things than I did. She won’t let me do dishes anymore because I do them wrong – I didn’t even know it was possible to wash a spoon wrong.
Marriage experts have noticed that women seem to be better at some things (like childcare, housework, cooking etc.) while men are better at others (like working in the yard, lying on the couch watching TV, etc.). So rather than advise couples to seek an even division of labor – which has been shown to make marriages even less happy — they now advise husbands and wives to focus on doing the things they’re good at and let the division of labor evolve in the way that works best for each particular marriage. But as all women know, they’re better at most things than men are, so while at least some men may have to labor from sunrise to sunset, women’s work, unfortunately, still will never be done…