Women spend twice as much time as men, on average, on childcare and household work. All groups experience a free-time gender gap, with women having 13% less free time than men, on average. Mothers spend 2.3X as much time as fathers on the essential and unpaid work of taking care of home and family Young women (18-24) experience one of the largest free-time gender gaps, having 20% less free time than men their age Working women spend 2X as many hours per week as working men on childcare and household work combined Mothers who work part-time spend 3.8X as much time on childcare and household work as fathers who work part-time Married women without children spend 2.3X as much time as their male counterparts on household work Among Latinos, mothers spend more than 3.6X as much time as fathers taking care of children and doing household work

The unequal division of unpaid work in the home, such as cooking, cleaning, and shopping for food and clothing, is a powerful testament to the tenacity of old gender norms. Women do significantly more of this work than men do, even when there are no children living in the home. This holds true for women regardless of their marital status, their employment status, or their level of education.

Among all adults without children, women do twice as much household work as men, dedicating 12.3 hours per week to these tasks, on average, compared to 6 hours for men. Similarly, among all single people without children, women do nearly twice as much household work as men, spending 10.6 hours per week on household tasks compared to 5.7 hours for men.

getting married seems to exacerbate the burden of household work on women. Married women do substantially more household work than their single women peers, while married men spend just a few minutes a day more than their single peers. Married women without children do 2.3 times as much household work as their male counterparts (14.3 hours per week versus 6.2 hours).

Working women spend significantly more time than working men on unpaid work in the home. This is the case whether they work full-time or part-time. It is the case whether they have children or not. Take household work like cooking, laundry, and the like. Women who work full-time do 1.8 times as much as men who work full-time; they spend 9.7 hours per week on it compared to 5.4 hours for men. Women who work part-time do 2.5 times as much household work as men who work part-time.

Across every group studied, men spend more time than women socializing, watching sports or playing video games, or doing similar activities to relax or have fun. Women overall have 13% less free time than men, on average. The gap balloons among some groups, with women having up to one-quarter less free time than men.

Women overall have 13% less free time than men, on average. The gap balloons among some groups, with women having up to nearly one-quarter less free time than men.

there is a wide gulf between our ideals and our realities, as we have seen in this report on how Americans divide the work of taking care of home and family. One reason for the persistence of these gender disparities is that the U.S. has failed to modernize its public policies to fit 21st century economic realities. Even though 78% of American women are in the labor force, the nation’s social infrastructure is still largely premised on the assumption that mothers will be at home with children.

Every high-income nation in the world provides for paid leave for new parents—except the United States. Most provide ample financial and institutional support for childcare and preschool. Our peers devote a substantial share of public spending to family benefits, but the U.S. invests only minimally in supporting families. For instance, family benefits account for 2.4% of GDP in Germany compared to 0.6% in the United States.

Even when young children enter school, typical American school hours are grossly misaligned with the workday, forcing families to either spend money on after school care or reduce their work hours.

Public policy alone will not entirely eliminate these deeply rooted gender disparities. Cultural change is needed too. But smart policy can nudge along positive behavioral change that ultimately advances equity and equality. For example, several countries include mechanisms in their family policy to encourage fathers to take paid parent leave. Many Nordic nations have a ‘use it or lose it’ provision for fathers. Other countries, like Canada, provide extra paid weeks of leave to families if both parents use the time.

The unequal division of care work, particularly, affects women’s opportunity and well-being in ways that cannot be measured solely in dollars and cents.

One way Americans deal with the housing affordability crisis is to move to distant suburbs and exurbs, where housing is cheaper than it is in central cities and job hubs. The tradeoff, however, is typically a long commute to and from work. But for women who are caring for children or elderly relatives, long commutes are often not feasible. Children and elderly parents get sick and need to get to doctors in the middle of a workday. School hours begin too late and end too early to accommodate a commute to a 9-to-5 job.

when schools close due to climate-driven events, mothers might have to take unpaid time off of work or pay for childcare. As Americans experience more dangerous heat waves, wildfires, and floods driven by climate change, the caregiving demands on women can increase, as they are more likely to be the ones responsible for helping children and elderly adults stay out of harm’s way.

Earlier this month, the Gender Equity Policy Institute released a new analysis of the 2022 Time Use Survey, administered by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The Time Use Survey is not perfect or granular, but it’s widely understood as the best and broadest data set of how Americans allocate their time. The survey asks respondents where and how they worked, how much time they allocated to childcare and/or domestic tasks, and how many hours were dedicated to “leisure.” You can take a closer look at the survey methodology and results here — and while they do breakdown results by race, age, income, education level, marital status, occupation, and number of children in the household, they do not distinguish between heterosexual and queer relationships (and also divide gender as male or female)….which means this analysis does not account for how queer relationships, in so many meanings of the word, fit into this larger analysis. With that said — the findings are stunning.

women spend more than twice as much time allocated to household work than men, even when they are single or do not have children. And getting married doesn’t split the load for women, as it theoretically would, but increases it: married women without children still do 2.3 times as much housework labor as their husbands.

men just had to hunt, but women back at the cave had to tend fires and care for kids and tan animal hides blah blah blah etc etc etc. These narratives make the nonsensical make sense: how else would you explain dramatically different approaches to cleanliness that seem to be fairly neatly divided by gender? It has to be biological, otherwise, well, women have just been caring about things that ultimately matter very little for centuries.

this particular argument falls apart when you consider women who aren’t “naturally” good at cleaning, or multi-tasking, or even caregiving — or just don’t like it. (Hello, all the ADHDers in my DMs also responding to these stats). Within this framework, the only way to conceive of these women is as faulty specimens: people who would be weeded out by natural selection. And yet somehow these people are still here, being women!

“Everything we call a sex difference, if you take a different perspective — what’s the power angle on this — often explains things,” neuroscientist Lise Eliot tells Darcy Lockman in All the Rage. “It has served men very well to assume that male-female differences are hard-wired.”

cleaning can be pleasurable the same way that popping a zit is pleasurable. It’s gross but oddly cathartic to erase abjection and mess, or to create order out of chaos. But you cannot separate the pleasures of degreasing the stove top from the pleasures of successfully meeting the demands of proper performance of womanhood. It’s like people who say they “just like being thin.” So much of why you like it is because it grants you societal power.

men can clean! I know men who are good at it, who take pleasure in it, who are also excellent noticers and multitaskers — and almost all of them were either 1) raised by single mothers or 2) spent time in the military. They were socialized, over an extended period, to understand cleanliness and multi-tasking as essential — with personal and social consequences if they did not.

“When people come over and our house is a mess, I feel this reflects badly on me as a person, adult, wife, and mother. My husband doesn't feel that at all,” a reader named Leah told me. “My father-in-law once told my husband he wished our house was cleaner when he comes to visit (don’t get me started). So now I scour the place top to bottom. My husband just shrugs and says: whatever, my dad can deal with it. The same applies to our kid. My husband can send him to school in ripped, dirty, or too-small clothes and not worry what people will think of him and his parenting skills. Me? I’m worried they are about to call CPS on us.”

if you’re “safe” being bad at womanhood — you can blow off societal repercussions. But a messy or dirty domestic space intersects with so many other stereotypes of class, race, education level, body size, and marital status. “My grandma grew up extremely poor in the South and I’ve always felt there was a strong class element to her standard of cleanliness,” a woman named Aimee told me. “Like even if you had no money, get a broom and a rag because you at least need a clean house.”

Or: a single woman can have a dirty apartment if she’s a hot, dirty mess; take away the hot thinness and she’s just a slovenly cat lady spinster.

I don’t think most people believe this! Yet these understandings endure, asking women to feel like failures or oddities, setting up shop in our relationships and slowly festering.

It is tremendously hard to divest from a way of understanding your own value in the world — and, by extension, others.

Men are socialized to see their spaces as utilitarian, spaces that serve them. Women, we serve our spaces.”

We can attempt, as a society, to socialize boys and men to be more clean, to notice more, to multitask more, to spend more time on domestic tasks and to allocate less time to leisure. We can teach men that their value (and their morality) is also rooted in their capacity to maintain a clean home: that they should also serve their spaces.

some of this work has happened: men in their 30s and 40s today do more domestic labor than their grandparents or great-grandparents did. But the gender discrepancy in domestic labor closed and closed and then….got stuck at a 65/35 split, and hasn’t budged in years.

The math just doesn’t math when it comes to domestic labor. When dads start allocating more time to parenting, it doesn’t subtract from the time moms spent parenting. When women leave the home to work for pay, the number of hours they allocate to domestic tasks doesn’t decrease, as one might assume, but goes up. If men do more, women still…..do more.

If you feel bound by these expectations: what would it take to free you? Because when I survey the hundreds of responses that arrived in my DMS when I posted the stats above, what I felt most was fatigue. Just look in the fucking drawer, is that where the bras go??? one woman wrote. God I’m so tired.

I’m always suspicious of arguments that ask anyone who’s subjugated, in some way, to do more. But in this case, the work is difficult, particularly for bourgeois women, because the work feels like something we’re so rarely asked to do: less.

At my grandmother's funeral, literally every single speaker talked about how much she loved her...house. How much care she put into it, how it was the joy of her life and source of her identity. When I was a kid, there was "clean" and there was "grandma clean". And after my mother died and I was rocked by grief, my grandmother attempted to console me by suggesting it wasn't that big of a loss because my mom (her daughter-in-law) wasn't a good housekeeper. (My mom was working full time, had four kids at home, and was literally dying.) I was so angry with my grandmother I barely every spoke to her again, and then at her funeral listening to everyone talk about her love of her house (!!) drove home what a waste of a life that was. She could have been kind. She could have been kind to my mom, who'd lost her own mother and was struggling. She could have been kind to me, her grand-daughter who was grieving. She could have had a life that meant something, but instead she focused on her house, which she saw as an extension of herself, and serviced her own pride and vanity. What a WASTE.

I feel like I am constantly drowning in a sea of paperwork/phone calls/emails - fighting with our health and dental insurance, calling contractors/plumbers/etc to do things for our house, filling out new tax paperwork. Not to mention fielding the barrage of spam emails/calls. I feel like this kind of stuff has expanded exponentially and I can’t tell if it’s just me, but it feels like every single one of these is a fight - someone sent the wrong paperwork to us, so I have to fill it out again; the insurance company makes a mistake on the claim and I have to file an appeal and follow up on it; contractor says they’re going to do something, doesn’t do it completely, and I have to fight to get them to come finish the job they agreed to. I get that we are all stretched so thin & distracted, but I am exhausted by trying to keep up with the apparently “essential” stuff of modern American adulthood