More than constituting a series of simple instrumental tasks, household work represents a complex set of interpersonal exchanges that enable family members to achieve (or fail to achieve) solidarity and cohesiveness.Ĭouples’ Perceptions of Their Roles at Home Women also spent more time multitasking, often juggling meal preparation with cleaning tasks and childcare.Īlthough our quantitative findings replicate the well-documented disparity in the division of labor between men and women, we also found that the nuanced ways couples interact with each another about and during these tasks were linked to the couples’ relationship satisfaction and sense of well-being. Overall, women spent much more of their time cooking, cleaning, and taking care of children, compared with their husbands. Women prepared 91 percent of weekday and 81 percent of weekend dinners, even though fathers were present at 80 percent of weekday and 88 percent of weekend dinners. Women on average spent 39 percent of their time on these activities, compared with 23 percent for men.
While men spent slightly more of their time on household maintenance tasks (4 versus 3 percent), women spent more time on chores (26 versus 14 percent) and childcare (9.1 versus 5.6 percent, respectively). In our study, we categorized household work into three activities: (1) household maintenance (e.g., organizing objects and managing storage issues) (2) household chores (e.g., meal preparation, cleaning, outdoor work) and (3) childcare (e.g., bathing, dressing, grooming, feeding, putting to bed). Moreover, leisure was most frequent for fathers (30 percent) and children (39 percent) and least frequent for mothers (22 percent). Women performed more than twice the number of tasks and assumed the burden of “mental labor” or “invisible work,” that is, planning and coordination of tasks. When our data were merged with the Chicago Sloan Study of 500 working families, we learned that men spent 18 percent of their time doing housework and took on 33 percent of household tasks, whereas women spent 22 percent of their time on housework and carried out 67 percent of household tasks. Working Couples and the Division of Labor at HomeĪmong couples we studied, on average, men worked longer hours outside the home, yet even in families where women worked equivalent or longer hours and earned higher salaries they still took on more household responsibilities. What are couples’ perceptions of their roles in the division of labor in the home? How do spouses coordinate and enact different patterns of household labor? How do family systems operate to sustain particular distributions of labor? More important, close examination of how husbands and wives collaborate on or fail to coordinate their household activities allows us to contemplate more encompassing phenomena such as gender roles issues of power, respect, and intimacy and attempts to broker an equitable or fair partnership. Studying how couples divide their many household chores is important on its own terms, as the results of the Pew poll suggest.
Other couples, however, appeared to carry out tasks separately or in collaboration without much tension or discussion. Determining who was responsible for various household tasks was a particularly contentious process for couples who tended to bicker about housework on a regular basis. Yet in the United States women still perform the majority of household tasks, and most of the couples in our study reported having no clear models for achieving a mutually satisfying arrangement. families has nearly doubled in the past 40 years, and their amount of time spent on childcare has tripled. Mirroring trends in industrialized nations around the world, men’s participation in housework in U.S. There were no differences of opinion reported between men and women, between older adults and younger adults, or between married people and singles. In this poll, 62 percent of adults said that sharing household chores is very important to marital success. According to a 2007 Pew Research Center poll, sharing household chores was in the top three highest-ranking issues associated with a successful marriage-third only to faithfulness and good sex. In the United States, ambiguity in division of household responsibilities between working couples often results in ongoing negotiations, resentment, and tension.