Women Who Earn More Than Their Husbands Still Do Most of the Housework

You’ve come a long way, baby.

For generations, we’ve heard feminists talk about breaking the glass ceiling and prioritizing career over family life. As a result, you’d think that we’d see men helping out with the chores around the house a little more, right?

Not so fast.

A new study out of the UK shows that women who bring home more money than their husbands still do most of the housework.

“Rational economic theory suggests parenthood and the resulting income and time pressure should lead to a more efficient sharing of household chores,” reports the study from the University of Bath. “However, the study of more than 6,000 heterosexual North American married households revealed this is not the case.”

Dr. Joanna Syrda, who conducted the study, sounds like she’s disappointed that gender roles are “so entrenched” that the results turned out to be what they were.

“Of course, we understand why specialized division of labour exists, but there is no reason for this specialization to be gender-specific. Traditional division has been conventionally explained by men earning more and working longer hours and has a certain logical appeal,” she said. “However, I found that the gender housework gap actually gets bigger for mothers who earned more than their spouses – the more they earned over their partner, the more housework they did.”

The explanation for this, according to Syrda, is that when a woman earns more than her husband, the couple believes that they’re exercising abnormal gender norms, so the wife takes on more housework to bring the gender norms back into balance. Kind of like balance in the Force in Star Wars … or something along those lines.

I can just picture it in my head. “Honey, I know you bring home more money than I do. Why don’t you do the dishes and the laundry so we can bring those gender norms back to normal.”

Yeah, right.

Despite Syrda’s complaining, men are doing more chores around the house than previous generations ever did, at least according to the Institute for Family Studies.

“There is good evidence that today’s fathers are doing more housework and child care than their own fathers did,” the IFS noted in 2016. “For example, a study by Frank Stafford and his colleagues at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan found that the amount of housework done by married men doubled between 1976 and 2005, while the amount done by married women decreased over the same period.”

Syrda says she’s worried about this trend because, in her eyes, if couples don’t split up the chores equally, their daughters may earn less money later on … or something.

“This is important, because how couples divide the increased domestic workload after becoming parents will be an important determinant of earnings inequalities between women and men over the course of their lives – a pattern once settled upon is often difficult to renegotiate. And these norms may be passed to their children,” she claims.

Here’s what I wonder: do we blame the patriarchy for chore inequality, or has feminism failed? Inquiring minds want to know.