Household Tasks and Childcare: Sharing the Load?

Women continue to spend more time than men taking care of children and doing chores around the house. This oft-lamented disparity is generally attributed to backward thinking and conservative values. Only rarely does anyone raise the possibility that such disparities could be linked to differences in the preferences of males and females.

Two researchers at the University of Wisconsin, April Bleske-Rechek and Michaela Gunseor, were curious. They wanted to know whether men and women who were dividing the work at home “unequally” were choosing to do it that way. So they conducted a study.

The study is entitled “Gendered Perspectives on Sharing the Load: Men’s and Women’s Attitudes Toward Family Roles and Household and Childcare Tasks”(2022). Two sample populations were recruited, a young adult sample and a middle-aged adult sample.

Using a seven-point scale, participants were asked to rate how they felt about 58 specific household tasks and 40 specific childcare tasks. Then they were asked how much responsibility they would be willing to take for each task.

In general, both men and women sought to take more responsibility for tasks they liked. For example, men liked yard care and home maintenance more than women and leaned toward wanting primary responsibility for such tasks. "In both samples, male-female differences in enjoyment of household and childcare tasks paralleled male-female differences in task-split preferences" (p. 301).

Interestingly, the authors used the term “enjoyment” to describe the participants’ attitudes toward these tasks. Participants apparently had a positive emotional connection to the work they preferred. They took pleasure in engaging in it.

Although there were some household tasks that men liked more than women, there was not a single childcare task that men liked more than women. Overall, men leaned toward the breadwinner role, and women leaned toward the homemaker role. Keep in mind, however, that, as with any research on group differences, there were large within-group differences.

The implication is that disparities in time spent on and attitudes towards childcare and housework were linked to the preferences of the men and women involved and were not simply the result of hidebound mentalities, a sense of duty, or arbitrary customs. The authors concluded that “disparities in men’s and women’s time spent on childcare and household tasks do not equate to dissatisfaction” (p. 212).

The authors noted that the differences in the preferences of men and women accord with what one would expect based on evolutionary theory and, in particular, on Robert Trivers’ concept of parental investment (1972). Trivers pointed out that while men can increase their reproductive success (i.e., father more children) by increasing the sheer number of their matings, human females cannot. As a result, women have a greater genetic interest than men in the children they do have. An increased commitment to family and home is a natural consequence.

These preferences show up early in life, the authors wrote. Differences in attitudes toward work and career appear as early as six years old, when girls already score “higher than boys in both communal values (helping and caring for others and orientation toward family versus career” (p. 203). Differences that show up that early often turn out to have a connection to the activities human men and women have engaged in over evolutionary time.

Bleske-Rechek and Gunseor were careful to avoid overgeneralizations. In several places, they pointed out that their findings represent distributional differences and probabilistic trends, with no suggestion that any individual will be a typical representative of the majority. Anyone interested in their methodology and statistics should consult the original article.

Bleske-Rechek and Gunseor don’t bring up an important issue, one that we have explored often in this post: the difference between what one’s culture tells one to believe/do/approve of and what one spontaneously enjoys. The Zeitgeist, the accepted wisdom, fear of condemnation from one’s peers, and the guilt and shame it can bring can mask one’s preferences, even from oneself. So can differences in the monetary rewards and prestige to be gained by one or another path taken in life. Pleasure isn’t everything. But it shouldn’t be ignored.