Ladies, if you want the most help with the housework and other chores, don't marry your boyfriend.
That's the word from a sociologist at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., who determined that married men do less housework than live-in boyfriends. "Marriage as an institution seems to have a traditionalizing effect on couples--even couples who see men and women as equal," co-researcher Shannon Davis told LiveScience.com.
The George Mason researchers analyzed data gathered in 2002 from 28 countries and 17,636 men and women as part of the Family and Changing Gender Roles III Survey. Everyone who responded was either married or cohabiting with a significant other.
On average, the men spent nine hours a week on housework, compared with the 20 hours women spent. "There's still a gender norm, since women do more housework than men regardless of union type," study team member Jennifer Gerteisen Marks, who is working on a doctorate degree at North Carolina State University, told LiveScience.com.
But no matter what the couple earned or how many hours they each worked outside the home, cohabiting males reported doing more hours of housework than married men, while the opposite was true for women.
Money does make a difference in one way. When a man earns more than his wife or girlfriend, he tends to do less housework than men with lower relative incomes. "Those in the household with greater resources will leverage those resources to bargain their way out of housework," the authors write in the Journal of Family Issues.
But those who view themselves as equals in a relationship tend to divide the chores equally as well; however, even in these egalitarian households, wives do more housework than husbands.
--From the Editors at Netscape
