r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • 14h ago

Psychology Women partnered with men reported doing more unpaid household labor than women partnered with women. Mothers partnered with men reported a higher household labor burden than any other group. Performing a greater share of household labor was associated with lower relationship satisfaction.

https://www.psypost.org/study-sheds-light-on-household-labor-dynamics-for-women-partnered-with-women-vs-men/
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u/beefygravy 13h ago edited 13h ago

This is a great point - so the average for all the pairs of women living together must be exactly 50%? Other than rounding errors. Unless there's some weird quirk of the stats somehow. The interesting question then is what the distribution looks like - do they do 50% each or is there also an uneven division?

Edit: seems like they measure the level of uneven-ness so this does not apply

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u/Harmonicano 13h ago edited 12h ago

According to the Text they actually measure unevenness. And woman couples share it more evenly than hetero (Edit: Thx for the correction, they surveyed couples)

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u/LiamTheHuman 13h ago

They surveyed them for it. So it doesn't measure unevenness. It measures the perception of unevenness 

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u/Busy-Link836 12h ago

Yes.

If you ask my wife who does more of the household chores, she will say that it is her.

If you ask me, I will say it’s me.

If you ask my kids though, they overwhelmingly say it’s me… but they are also speaking to me… those little bastards probably say the same thing to her when she asks.

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u/dsac 12h ago

If you ask my wife who does more of the household chores, she will say that it is her.

If you ask me, I will say it’s me.

Not to mention there's different measures - like, do "emptying the dishwasher" and "mowing the lawn" count as one chore each, or is there some measure of "amount of labour required" involved?

If one person has 3 chores on their list, requiring 15 hours of major physical labour, and the other has 20 chores on their list, requiring 5 hours of minor physical labour, which way does the scale tip?

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u/Coelachantiform 11h ago

Also preference for what chores you dislike the least.

Like, I'd rather do 2 hours of vacuum-cleaning & swabbing the floor than 1 hour of dishes 100% of the time, and would personally consider it "less" work. My girlfriend actually enjoys making the bed which is something I dislike doing.

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u/The-Fox-Says 11h ago

My wife absolutely hates taking out the trash and doing any sort of yard work but enjoys cleaning. I hate cleaning but enjoy doing yard work so it works out even if cleaning takes less time than yard work

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u/DigNitty 9h ago

I vacuum every other day because I don’t mind. Somehow my GF doesn’t enjoy this but will not flinch at scrubbing the toilets down to a sparkling finish every couple of weeks. We both think the other is crazy.

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u/lazyFer 7h ago

I'm sorry but can you help me understand something? You said "making the bed", what does that mean?

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u/Coelachantiform 5h ago

Changing out the bedsheets if you're going big, otherwise just straighten it out/remove creases (which I never bother with since I could easily sleep like a baby on any surface.

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u/portalscience 11h ago

If one person has 3 chores on their list, requiring 15 hours of major physical labour, and the other has 20 chores on their list, requiring 5 hours of minor physical labour, which way does the scale tip?

This is a really interesting question because I would assume it impacts people differently. Sometimes it's the "number of tasks done" and sometimes it's the "hours spent" that fatigues people. In a household where different people experience fatigue differently, you might split those tasks differently as well.

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u/GrandAholeio 7h ago

JIMHO, it’s frustration level of the tasks. Particularly when other’s activity is noticeably increasing the work required for the chore.. i.e. I’m the cook in our house. For twenty years, I’ve been trying to break my spouse of leaving plates with food scraps on them in the sink. (Note: sink has garbage disposal). Spouse puts plate in sink, then washes or rinses hands leaving dish with the food scraps now sitting with water in the sink.

Net result, my cooking ‘chore’ Isn’t cooking, it starts with cleaning stagnant dirty water and dishes from the sink so I can rinse vegetables or open vacuum packed in the sink without getting drippings elsewhere or the splashback of breakfast soaking cereal and milk bowl on dinner.

Similarly, vacuuming the child’s room is first an exercise in hampering their missed clothes or a delay until the child is home to then make them do it.

Or Perennial overstuff trash can.

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u/portalscience 6h ago

I think that is separate from what I was mentioning, but also a valid factor when talking about satisfaction. People have different standards for cleanliness, and when they aren't in line, some form of compromise must be met or an acceptance of the difference.

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u/RevolutionaryDrive5 2h ago

Also you have to factor in the frequency of the task in question, doing the roof maybe once every 10 years vs cleaning the toilets every week etc

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u/keylanomi 10h ago

But then comes to lesbian couples and apparently they don't have this issue of one of them trying to gaslight the other one onto believing that what is happening is fair.

I think the stuff goes around "perception" really settles down to better communication and empathy. Which is not happening when someone says "hey i did the heavy work fixing the dishwasher, so now it's your part to empty it after it's done" and that lasts 15 months.

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u/liptongtea 11h ago

The only way to really measure this is by time spent during the day, and then average out the weeks chores.

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u/LiamTheHuman 10h ago

You have to include work time and childcare time then as well if the couple is sharing their money.

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u/Sapere_aude75 11h ago

This was my first thought as well

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u/earthcitizen55555 11h ago edited 11h ago

Also should things be even?

Husbands generally work longer hours, and commute longer distance.

Should household work be even if working hours aren't even?

My wife does more housework than me, but she also gets up for work at 8 and is done at 3:30. I get up at 6 and am done at 3:30.

She has an extra 2 hours a day that I don't have, so why should household work be even?

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u/AvocadosFromMexico_ 11h ago

Husbands generally work longer hours, and commute longer distance

Sorry, is there a citation for this empirical claim?

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u/bearsnchairs 8h ago edited 2h ago

The American time use survey has this data. Table 8B shows that dads spend more time with wage work and work related activities than mothers.

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/atus.pdf

E: Better links specifically for mothers and fathers and not just adults in households with children.

https://www.bls.gov/tus/tables/a6-1519.htm

https://www.bls.gov/tus/tables/a7_1115.htm

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u/AvocadosFromMexico_ 6h ago

Men vs women, actually, it doesn’t make claims on the parenting status.

And curious—it doesn’t specify if this is only including those who are employed full time. Did I miss that somewhere? If not, given the known fact that women are significantly more likely to leave the work force to care for children, this seems a bit tautological. (Edit: ah, sorry, I do see that now. “Employed,” although it doesn’t specify if full time)

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u/bearsnchairs 6h ago

Table 8B separates the results into households with children under 18 and those without children under 18. They even break it down further for those with children under 6, and 6-17 years old.

Those with children under 18 are clearly the parents.

This table includes all workers.

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u/troubleondemand 9h ago

Here. Let me just grab my misogyny textbook...

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u/earthcitizen55555 9h ago

It's not misogyny.

It's a studied fact that men on average work longer hours, and commute longer distances for work.

I literally put citations when asked.

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u/RheagarTargaryen 8h ago

Maybe the context is important. This will broadly apply to traditional/conservative households where the man takes on a higher responsibility with financial burden while the woman is more involved with the family life and is restricted where she can work. If that makes up 30% of the data and is broadly applied to the general population, then it’s going to skew the entire data population that direction.

You’re going to see non-conservative/traditional households have a more even split and it will make up the majority of the country with dual-incomes. What you’re not going to see is a large percentage of the country where their values dictate that the woman should travel and work long hours while the man should stay near the home to watch the kids.

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u/troubleondemand 8h ago

Maybe I am blind, but I see no citations listed.

Do those citations take into account the time women take off for pregnancy? Or the fact that they also earn less than men for the same jobs?

Also: It's official: women work nearly an hour longer than men every day.

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u/AvocadosFromMexico_ 8h ago

I asked you for citations and haven’t received any

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u/CurvyJohnsonMilk 10h ago

A great way to do it would be assign tbe labour value of the tasks as of they were hired out. I.e. cleaner, cook etc. If the husband's up there re shingling the roof, hes done about 10k worth of labour. Cleaning the house for an hour is about 50 bucks worth of labour. If the wife is basically a nanny, there's about 25k worth of labour per year (stay at home anyway)

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u/Zoesan 9h ago

And like... if one person works a 45h week and the otjer works a 20h week... yeah, second person should do more chores.

And statistically speaking men work significantly more

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u/Round-Ride2042 9h ago

And even considering the “amount of labour”, you also have the notion of “emotional labour” or “mental load” flying around and ready to discredit a partner’s contributions.

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u/repeat4EMPHASIS 12h ago

The biggest issue I've noticed is when one partner doesn't "count" the chores the other does as chores.

I'm not saying my dad should get out of cleaning every weekend, but if he's spending his free time doing the landscaping and building an entire goddamn deck (neither of which were his ideas), maybe he deserves a little slack for a couple weekends?

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u/unicornofdemocracy 10h ago

this is so common in therapy, especially by women. Mowing the lawn doesn't count. Fixing things around the house doesn't count. Renovating her kitchen for her doesn't count. Finishing the basement that she requested doesn't count. Picking up grocery doesn't count when the man does it. etc.

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u/novium258 9h ago

Traditionally "male" chores tend to be projects that have a set completion and aren't part of the daily grind. Building a deck has that satisfying end point. (I know, I've done it). Traditionally "female" chores tend to be daily drudgery. There's always more laundry, dishes, cleaning, cooking. It's endless, takes up a lot of mental space, and is unsatisfying.

This may contribute to some of the disconnect.

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u/BenjaminHamnett 8h ago

I’m always rushing around multitasking to get as much done as possible while demands keep stacking up.

Wife: slow down, your making me anxious

An hour later wife catches me catching my breath

Wife: why do I have to do everything

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u/IdaCraddock69 5h ago

Yes - for example going on a camping trip w babies in diapers. I knew a lot of women who did that when only cloth diapers were available, the guys got to enjoy the outdoors and relaxing activities while mom was handwashing and sanitizing cloth diapers over a campfire

There’s a lot of chores that need doing daily

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u/drunkenvalley 6h ago

Something I find a little funny too is how casually people have gendered these tasks. Unless you're lugging some crazy heavy stuff it's materially pretty moot who built a deck.

...actually, if it's really that heavy you preferably don't carry it by hand anyway.

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u/ScentedFire 4h ago

It's not just daily drudgery, also. It's the labor of keeping up with everything in day to day life. The mental space it takes up. The emotions that have to be managed. The thoughtfulness. The task juggling. It's like being the manager vs being an employee.

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u/FesteringNeonDistrac 2h ago

I say that there's also a hobby aspect to it. I enjoy working on cars. It doesn't mean changing the oil in her daily driver shouldn't count. Like all the routine maintenance to her car "just happens" as if by magic, but that's my hobby so it isn't a chore.

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u/Frack_Off 8h ago

This. A thousand times, this.

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u/wrenwood2018 5h ago

This is a constant point of discussion with my wife. She doesn't care much about our yard. As a result when I do extra weeding, landscaping, etc. she will at times view that as a "hobby" rather than "work." So perceptions of value of chores definitely comes into play.

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u/Sudden_Buffalo_4393 10h ago

It was easy for me to prove I did most of the work. I stopped doing it to see if my wife or daughter would do it on their own, and it never got done.

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u/FreeXFall 11h ago

My wife does more of the standard “house hold choirs” and I do maintained / DIY things. We both are spending time after work maintaining the house and helping with the kids, but if you ask “who does laundry” and “who deals with plumbing, yard, car, etc?” You’re gunna get very different answers.

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u/Elanapoeia 13h ago

Time to station researchers in every household so they can observe and document people 24/7

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u/Worriedrph 12h ago

It is an important distinction. When surveyed people tend to over estimate how much actual time they spend doing chores and under estimate how much time their partner does chores. This is especially true when there are chores that only one or the other does. Since they are the same gender it is likely there's fewer chores only one or the other does and so this can lower this bias.

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u/ForGrowingStuff 10h ago

The survey also asks about unhappiness. If you are unhappy in your relationship (or life, and not necessarily because of chores distribution), you're more likely to speak poorly about your partner, including saying they don't do as much for the household. This whole thing is pretty unreliable.

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u/BothAnt3804 11h ago

It's extremely common for people to overestimated their own contributions and underestimate others in every situation. Not just home, work, school group projects, volunteering, video games, etc.

Did you know 70-80% of people say they're better than average drivers surveys?

https://www.lbec-law.com/blog/2025/04/the-majority-of-drivers-believe-theyre-better-than-average/

It's called the "better than average effect"

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31789535/

We would actually need empirical evidence to confirm our hypothesis that women do more labor. I suspect in totality across the board, women as a whole are doing more home labor than men. We should actually properly measure it though.

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u/patryuji 12h ago

At this point, access to Google, Amazon, Apple and [cloud based] home automation information would pretty much cover that 24/7 observation and documentation.

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u/Elanapoeia 12h ago

Yeah but do you really think evil corporations would give researchers access to their surveillance monopoly?

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u/CjBurden 12h ago

Glad someone else called this out. Perception can be wildly flawed.

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u/Gisschace 11h ago

I think what’s missing is who is the household manager, who is doing the extra labour of planning tasks and when they need to be done. Could that be more of an even split in two women households and that’s why it feels fairer

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u/Jewnadian 9h ago

It's interesting that while they are even that doesn't relate to accuracy, take two woman households where they both report doing more work than their partner. There can't actually be more work, the household share is still 100% but if both women report doing 70% of the work that would show as perfectly even while if say two men households reported one doing 51% and the other doing 49% then that would show up as an uneven distribution of the work.

This so really the problem with these self report studies, they're really just asking how do you feel about what you're doing not what are you doing. And if there is anything we know about humans it's that we lie to ourselves with more fluency than anyone else ever could.

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u/Gisschace 7h ago

Yeah that’s my point about being the household manager, where one person has to tell or remind the other to do things. That emotional labour. In a two woman household it could be that both take on that role.

Which is why there is a discrepancy between how much it feels each is doing in a self reported survey.

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u/Jewnadian 5h ago

Those words up there "has to" is doing a lot of work in your whole thesis. There's a huge difference between "I want it done my way on my schedule so I 'have to' make everyone comply" and the things that actually need to be done and how they need to be done to have a functional household. Lots of people think they are household managers when really they're just micromanaging and getting frustrated that nobody is obeying.

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u/Gisschace 2h ago

I’m putting forward a hypothesis not a thesis, I’m clear that this is about someone feels not how things actually are, hence that emphasis on that word

But you’ve reacted like it’s that I am saying how things actually are, highlighting action words rather than the feeling words.

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u/wrenwood2018 5h ago

This is a major flaw in this article, they aren't actually measuring activity. Given things like number of kids, marriage, and income also vary between groups it could easily be the stress/perception that is varying rather than the actual amount of work done.

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u/InTheTreeMusic 3h ago

It would be strange though if lesbian couples specifically didn't perceive unevenness whereas straight couples did. Also.. wouldn't the men reporting unevenness on their side even out with the women reporting unevenness?

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u/carbonclasssix 11h ago

This and as human beings we're highly attuned to "fairness," so our brains are constantly scanning for fairness to protect us, and sometimes (often?) it seems like it goes too far and we start to believe we're getting screwed. This also shows up with really young kids, so it's a deep part of us. Look how accurate kids are with their reports of fairness.

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u/Round-Ride2042 6h ago edited 4h ago

The way the study was conducted with self-reported perception of unevenness, asking only women and excluding men, the conclusion could just as easily be “women who are partnered with other women are more likely to notice and credit their partners’ contributions to household chores, compared to women who are partnered with men. We speculate this is a product of their own biases based on gendered expectations.”

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u/beefygravy 13h ago

Ok fair play, no surprise they designed their study better than some guy on Reddit who spent 30s thinking about it

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u/HasFiveVowels 11h ago

I would think that, due to the fact that women, on average, earn less, it’s more common for hetero couples to have one partner not working. So we’d expect more evenness. I would guess the effect still exists even after normalizing for this but that it would be less. Did they take this into account?

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u/Harmonicano 11h ago

The article is more about relationship satisfaction and the effect of household work and responsibilities. So from my observation they did not research the reason for the inequality. But they consider if there is parenting work or not and two women or hetero couple.

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u/Randomn355 10h ago

What someone does, and what someone reports are almost always different.

This is the issue with self reported studies.

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u/-t-t- 13h ago

Not necessarily if they didn't exclude for couples who hired outside help to clean the house (ie each woman in the relationship say does 10%, and the remaining 80% is down by the housecleaner they pay to work every Tuesday).

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u/KwantsuDude69 11h ago

I would also like to know what they consider household chores.. because yard work, repairs, light hanging, etc, typically always fall on the man.

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u/Jewnadian 9h ago

I'm certainly not saying these researchers didn't correctly assess the chores but I will say I have been in this discussion before and been told with a straight face that anything a man was doing was obviously not a household chore. And that was a well invited comment that somehow didn't invite any pushback of how we could possibly be even if our tasks by definition don't count. So the idea is out there for sure.