University of Michigan 412 Maynard St. Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1399 April 21, 1998 Contact: Diane Swanbrow Phone: (734) 647-4416 E-mail: [email protected]
The best way to get a man to do more housework? U-M study suggests you may need to divorce him.
ANN ARBOR---What does it take to get a man to do the dishes and clean the floor? The answer, a new University of Michigan study suggests, may be a divorce.
For the study, U-M Population Studies Center researcher Sanjiv Gupta analyzed data on 8,200 men and women from the National Survey of Families and Households to see how changes in their marital status affected time spent cooking, doing the dishes, washing and ironing clothes, cleaning the house, and other routine, repetitive household chores.
Gupta, a doctoral candidate in sociology, compared the amount of time spent on these tasks in 1987-88 and in 1992-93, to determine the impact of changes in marital and cohabitation status. His analysis took into account the number of hours spent working outside the home, school attendance, and the number of children and other adults in the home, among other factors.
Among his key findings:
--For men, moving in with a woman or getting married cut the time spent on routine household chores by three hours a week, on average. Separating or divorcing increased the time spent on housework by an average of four and a half hours a week. For women, however, moving in with a man or marrying increased housework time by four hours a week, while separating or divorcing decreased the same amount.
Separated and divorced men reduce their housework time by five and a half hours per week when they form new unions, Gupta found. "That there is no such effect for women suggests that divorced men may have a greater incentive to re-marry than divorced women."
--Despite the more egalitarian gender role attitudes among those who live together, moving in together has about the same impact on housework time as getting married, for both men and women.
--For men, additional children have no effect on their total weekly housework time, excluding child care. For women, each additional child adds more than three hours of housework a week, on top of the added time spent on child care.
Though men may have increased their housework time during the last two or three decades, as reported last week in a study by the Families and Work Institute, the U-M findings show that something else is going on as well.
Getting married reduces men's housework time substantially, while getting divorced has the opposite effect. The effects are reversed for women.
"Recent optimism about men doing more housework than they have in the past should be tempered by the realization that, at least with respect to housework time, getting married or moving in together is still more to a man's than a woman's advantage," says Gupta.
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