Less housework, more gender equality

robert whelan, 30 October 2006

Comparable to the Future Foundation’s report, ‘The Changing Face of Parenting’, which looked at parenting patterns, is a new American publication ‘Changing Rhythms of American Family Life’. The significant thing about the study (a collaborative work between the American Sociological Association and the Russell Sage Foundation reported in the New York Times) which explores how parents spend their time, is its scale and detail. Building on one of the three authors’ demographic research done for the Census Bureau, ‘time diaries’ were used to chart how families divided up their work, childcare and housework time. This involved interviews with thousands of households by professional interviewers who used a standard set of questions. As with the Future Foundation’s report, what made headlines with this study was the fact that despite an increasing number of working mothers and total working hours in families, the amount of time American parents are spending with their children has risen in the last 40 years.
But perhaps the two most interesting findings are to do with gender equity and the amount of time spent on housework. In relation to the former, the authors state that there is now ‘remarkable gender equity in total workloads’ between mothers and fathers. This claim is based on the fact that although women continue to do twice as much childcare and housework than men in two-parent families, in terms of total unpaid and paid workload, men and women both appear to do around 65 hours a week. Relating to the latter point of interest, time devoted to housework, the study also revealed a steep decline since the 1960s of time women spend on household chores. This finding applied particularly to married women. Furthermore, whilst married women’s housework time has nearly halved, married men’s has more than doubled.
Anastasia de Waal