Is your housework split sexist?

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Hello and thanks for downloading the More or Less podcast with a program that looks at the numbers in the news and in life and in your marriage.

I'm Tim Harford.

Do you ever have fights with your partner about who does more of the housework and whether it's fair?

Well, data might have the answer.

Corinne Lowe is an associate professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

She analyses surveys of how people spend their time, particularly in terms of home production, that is, things such as cooking and cleaning, and market work, that is, paid work.

If you're the male half of a heterosexual couple, I'm afraid it's bad news.

Or depending on your point of view, maybe good news, but good news that you need to make sure your partner doesn't hear.

We sat down to talk it all over while Corinne was in the UK to promote her new book on the subject, titled Feminomics in the UK and Having It All in the US.

So Corinne, welcome to more or less.

You've been looking at, among other things, how time is spent.

differently by men and women in the home.

So looking at the US, give us the statistical story there.

Yeah, it is fascinating because what what I see in the time use data is that women have undergone a gender revolution, but men haven't.

So I see women's time in market work start to, you know, skyrocket beginning in the 1960s.

And you see their time on housework going down because we get those time-saving technologies, you know, the dishwasher and the microwave.

And that kind of plateaus, that kind of levels out.

We're at the limit of what machines can do for us at home.

There's still now these tasks that kind of require us operating those machines.

And what we see for men is that their time is just completely flat.

So market work stays the same, 40, 45 hours a week.

Time doing housework stays the same.

It hasn't budged since the mid-1970s.

It just stays flat.

And so I think we have this very partial gender revolution, which is leaving us in an awkward spot.

Yeah.

So you're describing women doing more paid work

and because of time-saving technology, less unpaid work in the home.

Men's habits haven't changed at all much.

So

if women are doing less unpaid work, does that then mean that the amount of unpaid work between the sexes is the same now?

No, not at all.

So women are still doing massively more unpaid work.

And from an economics perspective, that could be okay because we believe in something called specialization in the household, which is often when you form a household,

it's more efficient.

Let's say you have a law career and maybe you met at law school.

So two people have a law career.

Well, it might be more efficient to have, and you know, talking about the U.S.

here, having one person work 80 hours a week and make partner, then both people work 40 hours a week and both miss that bar, right?

There can be these kind of big returns, what we call convex returns, where it kind of skyrockets if you put a little bit more effort in to your labor in the workforce.

And so

this is the idea going back to Gary Becker, right?

Exactly.

Nobel Prize win in economics.

Exactly.

So we.

So

you're better off if you specialize.

So we might be.

And so you might think that that's totally fine, okay?

But here's the catch.

We don't see it in the reverse.

So if women were just doing more home production because they did less market work on average than men or earned less for their market work, that would be fine, just efficient specialization.

But what I find in my paper that I call winning the bread and baking it too is that when the woman is actually the breadwinner, she still does more home production.

And I thought that must be driven by childcare.

And I was going off of, this was a little bit of me search.

I was going off of my own experience here and being like, well, maybe this is because, you know, she's the default parent and the kid wants mom and whatever.

So I excluded childcare.

And when I did, I found that women do twice as much cooking and cleaning as their lower earning male partner.

When she's the breadwinner, she still does almost twice as much cooking and cleaning.

In a lot of couples now, two people work, but one is the breadwinner, one earns more, right?

And in most couple types, when I see a heterosexual couple with a male breadwinner, that breadwinner does less of the housework.

When I see a lesbian couple, whoever the breadwinner is, does less of the housework.

And then when I see two men together, you know, gay men, whoever's the breadwinner does less of the housework, right?

But when it is a heterosexual couple with a female breadwinner, that's the only time the breadwinner does more of the housework.

Now, Corinne didn't want to jump to conclusions.

Perhaps there was something else going on with couples where the women earned more, which led to these outcomes.

One theory would be that men are so utterly terrible at household tasks and women so efficient that it makes economic sense for, well, for her to do the work.

Corinne tested that theory using couples who've separated.

When they're divorced, the woman's time doing housework goes down and the man's time doing housework goes up.

And if we take the sort of implied time cost of producing that housework, so we take the time they spend multiplied by their wage, that implied time cost goes down in divorce because it's actually she was doing too much relative to her wages, he was doing too little.

And then suddenly when they get divorced, he finds the broom.

He learns how to boil the water, right

corinne had a second test for whether the decision making is economically rational and that's to look at what happens to housework when the earnings are divided differently you might think that in couples where the wife earns a lot more than the husband the wages here are probably a reasonable proxy for the demands of the job well the husband would do more housework so what we did is we lined everybody up by the earnings ratio in the household and we said let's look at the couples where you know the husband earns 80% of the income and then all the way to the couples where the husband only earns 20% of the income.

And what we found is that men's time just doesn't budge across those ratios.

No response to the economic incentive.

There's no response to what should be the implied cost of having so much on her plate, which is her wage.

And in the data, I see these couples because then the next thing people say is, well, men's jobs are inflexible.

They can't take the time to kind of, you know, adjust their work hours and do more housework.

So I look at couples where they both work for a wage.

And in the U.S., the modal couple

is that she's a nurse and he's in transportation, truck driving or Uber driver, right?

That's just like an example of these couples where they're both hourly paid.

And in those couples, even when her wage is more than twice as much.

as his wage, right?

She's still doing a massive amount more housework.

And then here's the kicker.

She still works fewer hours than him.

He works more hours in the market.

So this couple, if he would pick the kids up from daycare so that she could pick up a shift as a nurse, they would literally have more money in their household budget because her wage is more than twice his wage.

But something's holding them back.

And we were left with no choice but to conclude that something is gender roles.

Yeah.

That is the situation in the U.S.

then.

You've You've gone into great detail about the American situation.

Is there anything we can say more globally about

how heterosexual couples divide their time?

Yeah, so we replicated this because we were like, is this American gender roles, right?

So we replicated this in the UK and in Australia as well.

And we had the same findings there about the female breadwinners still doing more of the housework.

So we don't think that this is just an American phenomenon.

We also just looking at sort of the global data, we saw that this housework inequality was very common in a lot of other countries.

And it becomes more of an issue, as I said, as women's earning power grows, which it is globally.

Thanks to Corinne Lowe, author of Feminomics, if you're in the UK, or Having it All if you're in the US.

And that's it for this week.

If you've seen a number you think we should take a look at, email us at more or less at bbc.co.uk.

We will be back next week.

Until then, goodbye.

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