Men are finally getting some credit for helping out around the house.
A new study proves for the first time that men actually do a bigger share of household chores than their wives admit. Shedding new light on the decades-old battle between men and women over housework, the study of 265 married couples with children, published this month in the Journal of Marriage and Family, shows that wives estimate, when asked, that their husbands do 33% of the housework. But when researchers tracked men's actual housework time, they found husbands were shouldering 39% of the chore load.
Husbands aren't getting off the hook entirely, though. They still give themselves too much credit, the study shows, claiming they do 42% of the work around the house.
The study by sociology professors Yun-Suk Lee, University of Seoul, Korea, and Linda Waite, University of Chicago, compared spouses' answers on a survey with data from an "experience sampling method." With this approach, people wear watches that beep randomly once every two hours, then write down what they're doing.
Researchers used the answers to estimate time spent during one week on chores, including washing dishes, cleaning the house, laundry, cooking, shopping, family paperwork and maintenance. They found wives not only underestimate their husbands' contribution, but overestimate their own, saying they carry 67% of the load, rather than the 61% indicated by the study.
The fact that women still do the majority of housework despite their expanded duties as breadwinners has fueled tensions in millions of homes. But many men have long insisted that they do more than their wives give them credit for. This is the first study to demonstrate it.
Bill Rogers and Joan Cummins, a Plymouth, Mich., couple, know the problem all too well. Mr. Rogers does a big chunk of the housework, including shopping, weekday cooking, yardwork and his own laundry, and Ms. Cummins admits she undervalues his role. But so many of the mundane tasks that must be done immediately fall to her, Ms. Cummins says, such as cleaning the kitchen, that she becomes resentful. "It's the everyday things that get under your skin."
When she arrived home one recent day from her job as a bank vice president, she found a dishwasher full of clean dishes needing to be put away and used cups by the sink. "How come you didn't empty the dishwasher?" she asked Mr. Rogers, who arrives home earlier from his job as an insurance agent.
"Well, who cleaned the garage this weekend?" he replied. And their customary argument began. "You never give me credit for anything I do," he told her.
It's clear men are doing more work around the house. Women's average housework time fell by nearly half between 1965 and 1995, to 17.5 hours a week from 30, while men's almost doubled to 10 hours from 4.9 hours, based on a survey of four national studies published in 2000 by the University of Maryland's Suzanne Bianchi and others.
But women still feel more burdened. Many have been raised to care more about the details of housework, causing them to overlook any efforts by their husbands that don't meet their standards. Linda Trickey, Atlanta, a corporate attorney, says that while her husband pulls his weight around the house, she hates it when he puts their kids' clothes into the dryer before checking to make sure the stains are out. And sometimes he doesn't notice undone tasks, such as clearing a table of paper piles before a dinner party.
Her husband, Allen Johnson, a civil engineer, says: "I'll do 95% of the things she asks me to do, and she'll notice the 5% I didn't do."
One wife who makes more than her husband says she secretly resents the fact that she still does more housework. "I think, 'I make more money, I contribute more to the house [financially], so you should do more chores at home,' " she says. But, like many women, she fears hurting her husband's pride if she brings it up.
The arrival of children often shifts more housework onto wives, largely because women are more likely after childbirth to increase their time spent at home. This causes stress that can blind women to their husbands' efforts. Though Staci and Christopher Reeder, Lafayette, Calif., split housework 50-50 early in their marriage, she believes she has borne closer to 60% of the load since the birth of their daughter, age 2, partly because she has a shorter commute. While Mr. Reeder does yardwork, family finances and a lot of child care and miscellaneous chores when he is home, he has found it "amazing how we ooze into our gender roles" after becoming parents.
They quarrelled about the issue recently. Chris felt he'd put in a hard night of housework the evening before, preparing dinner, getting their daughter ready for her bath and taking out the trash. Staci, meanwhile, was hard at work emptying closets in preparation for work by a contractor. But when Chris entered the kitchen the next morning, his wife was scrubbing the counter in obvious irritation that he had left it messy.
"What are you doing?" Chris asked, touching off an argument. Staci felt she shouldn't have to clean up his mess, while Chris felt she wasn't recognizing all the other work he had done. While the two soon laughed and made up, housework remains a constant source of tension, for them and other couples they know, Staci says. "When we all get together for dinner and drinks, this is the kind of thing we talk about."
-- Email your comments to sue.shellenbarger@wsj.com.
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