I do hate to generalize, but I feel like it’s pretty safe to say that in most straight relationships, it’s usually the women who are left taking care of the majority of the housework. Most men don’t pitch in unless asked, and even then tend to do a bit of a half-hearted job, at least in my experience. Then again, maybe I’m just dating the wrong kind of guys because a new study found that men these days are doing more housework than ever before.
- Wait, really? According to the Resolution Foundation‘s study, entitled “The Time Of Our Lives,” men have increased the amount of unpaid work, AKA housework, they do over the past 40 years by 5 hours and 35 minutes per week. Huh, go figure. On the flip side, they’re doing less paid work while women are doing more.
- Apparently, women are doing less unpaid work. According to the study’s findings, women are averaging 2 hours and 44 minutes less of housework every week, which makes a change given how much more of it we were doing than men for centuries!
- Things seem to be pretty equal about now. While it may be hard to believe, the study suggests that paid and unpaid work time among men and women generally seems a lot more equal now than it did in years prior, though I know it doesn’t seem like that to many people!
- However, there is a worrying income disparity. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the study also found that low income families tended to have less paid working hours than those who had more money. “Debates around how people spend their time often focus on a single goal – speeding up the move to a shorter working week to enable more time for socialising, sport and hobbies,” said George Bangham, Economist at the Resolution Foundation. “But this isn’t how people’s lives have changed over the past four decades, desirable as it may be. Men are doing less paid work, while women are doing more. Both have less time for play – with childcare up, and leisure time down. Instead, a worrying new ‘working time inequality’ has emerged, with low-income households working far fewer hours per week than high-income ones.”
