Musings of a Madman

By Alice Turner

A new study has found that on average, after marriage the wife dedicates seven hours per week more to housework, while husbands do on average one hour less of housework.

“It’s a well-known pattern. 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,” said in a statement Frank Stafford, of the university’s Institute for Social Research (ISR), who directed the study. “And the situation gets worse for women when they have children,” he added in the statement.

I can hardly see the situation “worse” for women. It’s quite clear that men and women have different preferences and men tend to work more outside the home while women have a tendency of doing more housework. This is hardly a matter of culture but rather a psychological difference which goes far back to the beginnings of mankind and will not go away anytime soon. Also, the study found that both genders did more around the house after exchanging vows.

It was quite interesting to find out that while married men worked more inside their home, by an average of one hour, before they got married, unmarried women worked less than any other category of women. Married women with at least three children do around 28 hours a week, nearly threefold compared with their husbands’ 10 hours.

The study, which was federally-funded, is based on time-diaries and questionnaires from a nationally representative sample of men and women over a 10-year period between 1996 and 2005.

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