It's A Great Time For Men To Do Housework

Coronavirus has meant a huge increase in necessary housework and child care. For the sake of your relationship, figure out how to split it up fairly

- Sophia Benoit

Coronavirus has scrambled our domestic arrangements. Most of us are still clocking in from the dining table; restaurants are either closed, restricted, or simply a kind-of-bad idea, and the future of school remains a messy, uncertain patchwork around the country. The heaviest burdens of the pandemic have fallen on people who have gotten seriously ill or lost loved ones, but for many lucky enough to avoid that, the defining experience of the past few months has been trying to take care of a child between Zoom meetings, or just wondering how it’s possible that you have to do dishes again. There’s more domestic work to be done than ever, and more compromises required to make sure it all happens on schedule. So for the sake of your relationship, it’s worth spending some time to take a hard look at who is actually doing the work at home and making adjustments if necessary.

Among heterosexual couples, women tend to do more housework than men, which probably comes as a shock to no one. What is surprising is how little mitigating factors affect that discrepancy at all – the imbalance still appears in progressive couples, in households without children and in instances where the woman outearns the man. When there are kids at home, the disparity is only exacerbated – one Pew social trends study showed that in dual-income households in America, mothers did about 28 hours of housework and child care per week, compared to 16 hours for fathers. (In India, women spent nearly six hours a day in unpaid labour compared to less than one hour for men, according to the OECD, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.)