Historically, married women in the United States have done the lion’s share of their households’ 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 Socius.
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