One chart shows how many more hours married women spend on housework than their husbands in 5 different types of opposite-sex marriages
Gabriele Holtermann-Gorden/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images
- Pew Research Center compared the hours opposite-sex married couples spend on housework and caregiving.
- In five types of marriages, only one has men putting in more caregiving time.
- If you're willing to share how you divide the housework in your marriage, reach out to mhoff@insider.com.
Women seem doomed to more housework than their husbands, no matter how much of the household income they bring in.
That's according to the Pew Research Center, whose recent report highlights the inequality in caregiving and household duties in opposite-sex marriages by examining several years of data from the American Time Use Survey.
The chart below shows the average time spent per week on housework and caregiving duties for five different kinds of income arrangements for opposite-sex marriages. Insider added together the separate results for housework and caregiving noted in the report, so the values below may be slightly different from the exact results due to rounding.
"Even as financial contributions have become more equal in marriages, the way couples divide their time between paid work and home life remains unbalanced," the new report stated, which noted 11% of opposite-sex marriages in 1972 were considered egalitarian marriages, compared to 29% in 2022, per Pew's analysis of the Annual Social and Economic Supplement.
"Women pick up a heavier load when it comes to household chores and caregiving responsibilities, while men spend more time on work and leisure," the report added.
Even when women earn the same as or more than their husbands, they often still spend more time on housework
In egalitarian marriages, women are spending more of their time a week on household and caregiving duties than their husbands are, on average. This kind of marriage is defined in the report as "both the wife and husband earn between 40% and 60% of the couple's combined earnings."
In marriages where men are still earning money but the wives are earning over 60% of their earnings, the wives are still spending more time a week on household work and caregiving duties. Wives in these wife-primary-earner marriages spend about 11 hours a week on housework and caregiving compared to their husbands' almost 8 hours a week.
Women in husband-primary-earner marriages, where men earn over 60% of the pair's earnings, are spending roughly triple the time a week on housework and caregiving, and roughly four times what their husbands spend on these responsibilities in marriages in which the husband is the sole earner.
The one type of opposite-sex marriage in which the script is flipped is when women are the sole earners. In these cases, husbands spent about an hour more on housework and caregiving.
Results from Gallup a few years ago also show inequality of different household and caregiving duties.
"Despite some changes over the past two decades, the division of labor in U.S. households remains largely tilted toward traditional stereotypes: Women are more likely than their husbands to take care of the house and children, and men remain the primary caretakers of the car and the yard," stated the Gallup post.
The 2019 results from Gallup are about heterosexual couples who are either married or live with one another. 58% said the woman was more likely to do laundry in their households compared to 13% who said the man was more likely. Half said the woman was more likely to take care of kids daily compared to 7% who said the man was more likely. A higher percentage said the woman was more likely to also prepare meals or clean the home in their household than the percentage who said the man was more likely to do so.
Additionally, results on McKinsey focused on dual-career couples (DCCs) can show how there are differences between opposite-gender and same-gender couples.
"Our research found same-gender DCCs take a more equitable approach to work-life responsibilities," the authors of the McKinsey article wrote. "Only 28 percent of women in same-gender DCCs say they do most or all of the housework, compared with more than half of women in opposite-gender DCCs."
Men in same-gender, dual-career couples were more likely to say this about household duties than men in opposite-gender couples.
Lawmakers could help bring equality to America's marriages
According to USA Today's reporting on the new Pew report, Aliya Hamid Rao, an assistant professor in the department of methodology at the London School of Economics, thinks actions like affordable childcare and an increase in remote work opportunities are some of the actions that could help with reallocating household work for couples.
"I really think this is a lot about what social policies and support structures are in place that allow men and women to participate fully in paid work and at home," Rao said per USA Today.
Outside of the ATUS results analyzed by Pew Research Center, the new report suggests that Americans think society see the value of men and women's contributions at home differently. That's according to Pew Research Center's own January survey results of US adults. They were asked "what do you think American society values more these days" for women and men in general.
57% of US adults said American society values the "contributions men make at work." Men and women pretty much said the same thing — 55% of men and 58% of women answered this way. Regardless of men, women, or overall US adults, the share was 7% for each of these groups for how American society values men's contributions at home more.
For women's contributions, 20% of adults and 20% of women said society values their contributions at work more than at home, while 19% of men said this. For women's contributions at home compared to at work, 31% of adults said this.
While US adults' perception of how society views men and women's contributions at work and at home vary, so does how much time men and women generally spend in the labor force. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, the labor force participation rate and employment-population ratio of men are both higher than that of women.
While a lower share of adults say society values women's contributions in the workplace compared to the share that say society values their contributions at home, a fact sheet from the National Women's Law Center also stated that "mothers' wages are also affected by a lack of support for women's disproportionate caregiving responsibilities."
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