University of Michigan researchers have just discovered the reason why married women always have so much housework to do: their husbands!
A new study from the University of Michigan shows that having a husband creates an extra seven hours of extra housework a week for women. But a wife saves her husband from an hour of chores around the house each week.
"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 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 a statement.
Link - via Miss Cellania
Three of those are one-off chores. You maybe do them once a year (or less). If you count daily and weekly tasks like laundry, dishes, vacuuming, dusting, cooking… Well, you can see how that would add up a lot more quickly."
Sure, washing the dishes happens every day. For 10 minutes. Mowing the lawn takes a couple hours. Then edging takes another hour. And then every month or so, you got to trim the hedges. When the grass isn't growing, you're raking leaves. Or shoveling snow, or trimming those tree limbs that have been scraping the siding. And while you are up on the ladder, the gutter is starting to droop on that side of the house. Oh, that's because the wood it's attached to has started to rot. So that's got to be replaced. And it probably started to rot because the shingles need to be replaced. So fix all that.
So yeah. That stuff doesn't count because it isn't done every day for 10 minutes.
My husband works part time and he generally does the dishes because he's home before me and not because he's been asked too. He vacuums and sweeps for the dame reason. He also has to wear a uniform to work and so he washes clothes more than I do.
I also don't keep a lot of crap out that requires dusting like knick knacks and photographs. I like to think of myself as minimal but know deep down that I hate to dust.
Three of those are one-off chores. You maybe do them once a year (or less). If you count daily and weekly tasks like laundry, dishes, vacuuming, dusting, cooking... Well, you can see how that would add up a lot more quickly.
And maybe I live in a weird neighbourhood, but the people pushing the lawnmowers are mostly women...