division of laundry by couple type
By Maya Dusenbery • @mayadusenbery • 8 years ago

Chart of the Day: Same-sex couples are better at sharing household chores

division of laundry by couple typeAccording to a not-entirely-surprising survey of 225 dual-income couples by the Families and Work Institute, same-sex couples do a better job of communicating about and sharing household labor. The Washington Post reports:

In dual-income straight couples, women and those who earn less money or work fewer hours tend to take primary responsibility for stereotypically female — and more labor-intensive — chores such as child care, grocery shopping, washing dishes, cooking and laundry, according to a survey of 225 gay and straight dual-income couples being released Thursday by PriceWaterHouseCoopers and the Families and Work Institute.

[…] Men, higher earners and those who work longer hours – which researchers say can signify a position of power — in straight couples tend to do the yard work and outdoor, auto and more traditionally male chores that tend to be less time-consuming.

Yet in same-sex couples, income and work hours didn’t have the same affect. And, perhaps most important, same-sex couples were much more likely to share equally the time-consuming work of routine child care – 74 percent of gay couples versus 38 percent of straight couples. And gay couples were more likely to equally share the unpredictable work of caring for a sick child – 62 percent versus 32 percent for straight couples.

Overall, everyone seems about equally happy with the division of labor they have. However, men in gay relationships were more satisfied with their household and child care duties than women in straight relationships. According to the researchers, this may be because straight women are more likely to hold back when it comes to talking about it with their partner. And overall — gay or straight, male or female — couples who had a conversation about how to divide the labor when they first moved in together were more satisfied than those who’d wanted to have such a discussion but didn’t end up doing so.

division of child care by couple type

“The people who said they bit their tongue had a lower satisfaction with division of household responsibilities. So satisfaction may not be so much about what you do, but whether or not you felt you had a voice. Did you say what you wanted? Or did you let it evolve and feel like you couldn’t pull yourself out of the situation once it settled and got stuck?” the study’s author Ken Matos explains. “Perhaps because they can’t default to gender, people in same-sex couples are in more of a position to have these conversations.”

St. Paul, MN

Maya Dusenbery is executive director in charge of editorial at Feministing. She is the author of the forthcoming book Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick (HarperOne, March 2018). She has been a fellow at Mother Jones magazine and a columnist at Pacific Standard magazine. Her work has appeared in publications like Cosmopolitan.com, TheAtlantic.com, Bitch Magazine, as well as the anthology The Feminist Utopia Project. Before become a full-time journalist, she worked at the National Institute for Reproductive Health. A Minnesota native, she received her B.A. from Carleton College in 2008. After living in Brooklyn, Oakland, and Atlanta, she is currently based in the Twin Cities.

Maya Dusenbery is an executive director of Feministing and author of the forthcoming book Doing Harm on sexism in medicine.

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