{"id":248018,"date":"2025-02-27T14:54:39","date_gmt":"2025-02-27T14:54:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2025\/02\/27\/married-men-are-doing-more-cleaning-and-laundry-than-in-the-past\/"},"modified":"2025-02-27T14:54:39","modified_gmt":"2025-02-27T14:54:39","slug":"married-men-are-doing-more-cleaning-and-laundry-than-in-the-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2025\/02\/27\/married-men-are-doing-more-cleaning-and-laundry-than-in-the-past\/","title":{"rendered":"Married men are doing more cleaning and laundry than in the past"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"text-align:center\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i2.wp.com\/www.sciencenews.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/MAR_014_25_A_598X336_option2_V02.png?ssl=1\" class=\"attachment-post-thumbnail size-post-thumbnail wp-post-image\" alt=\"Married men are doing more cleaning and laundry than in the past\" title=\"Married men are doing more cleaning and laundry than in the past\" \/><\/div> \r\n<br><div data-component=\"video-embed\">\n\t\t\t\t\n\n\n\n\n<p>Historically, married women in the United States have done the lion\u2019s share of their households\u2019 laundry, cooking and cleaning. But that <a href=\"https:\/\/journals.sagepub.com\/doi\/10.1177\/23780231251314667\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">gendered norm appears to be shifting<\/a>, with the gap between the time married women and men spent on such chores shrinking by 40 percent over the last two decades, researchers report February 6 in <em>Socius.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>By the numbers, from 2003 to 2005, married women spent, on average, 4.2 hours per week on traditionally feminine tasks, such as meal prep and tidying up, for every 1 hour married men spent on those same tasks, according to the American Time Use Survey, a nationally representative survey that shows how, where and with whom Americans spend their time. By the 2022 to 2023 survey, the gender gap had shrunk to married women spending 2.5 hours on those sorts of chores for every 1 hour by married men.<\/p>\n\n\n<aside class=\"sn-conversion rich-text rich-text--with-sidebar\">\n<style><![CDATA[\n.email-conversion {\n  border: 1px solid #ffcccb;\n  color: white;\n  margin-top: 50px;\n  background-image: url(\"\/wp-content\/themes\/sciencenews\/client\/src\/images\/cta-module@2x.jpg\");\n  padding: 20px;\n  clear: both;\n}\n\n]]><\/style>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"rich-text embedded-conversion-content is-layout-flow wp-block-group-is-layout-flow\">\n<a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencenews.org\/article-type\/deep-end-podcast?cta=top\">\n  <\/a><\/div><a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencenews.org\/article-type\/deep-end-podcast?cta=top\">\n<\/a>\n\n<style><![CDATA[\n#dynamic-conversion {\n  border: 1px solid #ffcccb;\n  max-width: 100%;\n  height: auto;\n  clear: both;\n}\n]]><\/style>\n\n\n\n\n<\/aside>\n\n\n<p>\u201cMen are doing quote, unquote \u2018women\u2019s work,\u2019\u201d says Melissa Milkie, a sociologist at the University of Toronto. \u201cThere is a hopeful story here.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Milkie\u2019s findings add to a longstanding debate among gender scholars over whether or not the gender revolution \u2014 marked by increasing parity between men\u2019s and women\u2019s employment and division of household tasks \u2014 has stalled over the past two decades. That is, in the 1960s married women did seven times more housework than their husbands. By the mid-1990s, those numbers had plummeted, with married women doing roughly twice as much housework than their husbands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Since then, progress has dropped off. In 2003, for instance, women devoted 18.5 hours per week, on average, to all housework \u2014 including traditionally feminine tasks, such as cleaning, cooking and laundry, as well as childcare, shopping, outdoor chores and gardening \u2014 compared with married men\u2019s 10.1 hours per week. Twenty years later, women were spending 17.7 hours on such tasks compared with married men\u2019s 11.2 hours per week: Even in the 2020s, married women still do roughly 1.6 times more housework than married men.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But looking at hours spent on all forms of housework in aggregate masks real progress, Milkie argues. Besides a shrinking gap in time spent on traditionally feminine chores, the hours married men and women spend shopping for groceries and other household needs is nearing parity. The gender gap in childcare hours remains large, with married women spending almost twice as many hours caring for their children than married men. But the persistence of that gap is partially explained by the fact that both married men and women have increased the time they spend with their children since 2003.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A limitation of the study is that it cannot tease out the time single parents spend on such tasks or account for time spent on other caregiving responsibilities, such as elder care, that typically fall to women, the team notes.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Moreover, demographic shifts over the past two decades <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencenews.org\/article\/gap-parenting-time-education-middle-working-class-moms\">can explain<\/a> the decreasing amount of time women devote to household tasks, the team found. For example, younger, college-educated married women are doing less housework than older, less educated married women. Yet similar demographic shifts cannot explain why men are spending more time on housework. Instead, the researchers suspect that shifting beliefs around what constitutes women\u2019s work might underpin men\u2019s change in behavior.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Trends that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic are telling, Milkie says. While everyone significantly increased time spent on chores and childcare in 2020, by 2023, the hours women spent on such tasks had largely returned to the pre-pandemic baseline. But men have remained more equal contributors. In other words, Milkie says, men developed new household habits and, to some extent, those habits have persisted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It\u2019s easy to look at the small drop in women\u2019s overall housework between 2003 and 2023 and lament the glacial pace of change, says sociologist and demographer Mila Kolpashnikova of The University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, who was not involved with this work. But breaking down chore types to look at those deemed feminine shows that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencenews.org\/article\/some-chores-linked-less-sex\">meaningful cultural shifts<\/a> may be afoot. \u201cYou can look at [these changes] as a glass-half-empty type of change. But you can also look at it as a glass-half-full type of change, as this paper shows,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\t\t\t<\/div>\r\n<br>\r\n<br><a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencenews.org\/article\/married-men-doing-more-cleaning-laundry\">Source link <\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Historically, married women in the United States have done the lion\u2019s share of their households\u2019 laundry, cooking and cleaning. But that gendered norm appears to be shifting, with the gap between the time married women and men spent on such chores shrinking by 40 percent over the last two decades, researchers report February 6 in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":248019,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.sciencenews.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/MAR_014_25_A_598X336_option2_V02.png","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[606],"tags":[47178,24718,2833,5517],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248018"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=248018"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248018\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":248020,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248018\/revisions\/248020"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/248019"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=248018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=248018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=248018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}