It’s a dilemma as old as the feminist movement, and one that graces the house of nearly every family in American today: How should two partners divide the workload that comes along with earning money and making a home?
To be sure, there are as many answers to the question as there are families in America. The solutions depend on a myriad of variables – expectations of cleanliness, culinary preferences, earning potential, family values and more. The topic has filled the pages of magazines and newspapers across the country.
It turns out, researchers know more than most of us can imagine about how men and women share responsibilities. And, while every family is different, there are some norms across our society.
The best resource I’ve come across is called America’s Time Use Survey, an on-going collection of data that measures how much time people spend doing various activities. The survey is sponsored by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau.
In 2010, the survey found:
- On the days that they did household activities, women spent an average of 2.6 hours on such activities, while men spent 2.1 hours.
- On an average day, 20 percent of men did housework such as cleaning or doing laundry, compared with 49 percent of women.
- Forty-one percent of men did food preparation or cleanup, compared with 68 percent of women.
- On an average day, among adults living in households with children under 6, women spent 1.1 hours providing physical care such as bathing or feeding a child, and men spent 26 minutes providing physical care.
So, it’s clear that, on average, women are doing more of the housework than men, but the survey also shows that men work more outside of the home. On the days that they worked, employed men worked 41 minutes more than employed women.
Of course, the survey reports averages, and individual households can differ greatly from those. Still, it sparked some interesting discussions in our house.
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