Why wives do domestic work

A feminist psychologist writes a NY Times op-ed:

Sociologists attribute the discrepancy between mothers’ expectations and reality to “a largely successful male resistance.” This resistance is not being led by socially conservative men, whose like-minded wives often explicitly agree to take the lead in the home. It is happening, instead, with relatively progressive couples, and it takes many women — who thought their partners had made a prenatal commitment to equal parenting — by surprise. Why are their partners failing to pitch in more? ...

The couples offered three explanations for this labor imbalance. The first was that women take over activities like bedtime, homework and laundry because men perform these tasks inadequately. ... The second explanation involved forgetting or obliviousness. ... Finally, some men blamed their wives’ personalities. ...

Division of labor in the home is one of the most important gender-equity issues of our time. Yet at the current rate of change, MenCare, a group that promotes equal involvement in caregiving, estimates that it will be about 75 more years before men worldwide assume half of the unpaid work that domesticity requires.

If anything is going to change, men have to stop resisting.

The article gives examples of men who offer to help with housework, but the wives insist on doing it themselves so that they can do it their way.

What the wives really want, according to the article is for the men to do the parenting and housework, and to do it exactly as the wives want it to be done.

I think that will take more than 75 years.

The article does not directly attack white people, but another NY Times article does:

Since the 2016 presidential election, scholars have hotly debated the best way to counter the “weaponization” of the Middle Ages by a rising tide of far-right extremists, whether it’s white nationalist marchers in Charlottesville, Va., displaying medieval symbols or the white terrorist who murdered 50 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, using weapons inscribed with references to the Crusades.

And hanging over it all is an even more fraught question: Does medieval studies have a white supremacy problem of its own?

To some scholars, the answer is yes, and not just because the field is overwhelmingly white. Scholarship on the Middle Ages, they argue, helped create the idea of white European superiority, and still bolsters it today.

It is almost impossible to study European history without discussing what made the culture so great.

Update: The NY Times published several letters on housework inequities, in response to the above op-ed. None of them really say that is appropriate for women to do most of the housework.

Gates wants men in the kitchen

The Bill Gates Foundation is supposedly saving the world, but I have my doubts. According to the latest report:

According to Gates, “globally, women spend an average of 4.5 hours a day on unpaid work. Men spend less than half that much time.” The unpaid labor gap is especially large in poor countries. “In India, to take one example, women spend about six hours, and men spend less than one hour,” she writes.

And when women are too busy cleaning and cooking, they have less time for paid work. Girls in many countries fall behind in school because they're swamped with tedious chores. Gates writes that reducing women’s unpaid labor from five hours per day to three can increase a country’s female labor-force participation rate by 10 percent. If women participated in the economy at the same levels as men, she writes, global GDP could increase by 12 percent. ...

Couples should start having conversations about how they can redistribute unpaid chores more fairly, Gates says. That means more American dads pushing vacuum cleaners, and more husbands like one Gates met in Tanzania, who volunteered to help his wife fetch water. ...

For those who think it can’t be done, Gates offers an example from her personal life. Though Bill and the couples’ children would always help with after-dinner cleanup, she nevertheless was always the last person left in the kitchen, “doing those last few little things.”

Is increasing "global GDP" really their goal? I guess it would increase if they replace unpaid labor with paid labor, but why is that desirable?

A billionaire wife nags her family into a more equitable system for cleaning up the kitchen, and that somehow sets an example for the Third World?

I think that 50 years from now, it will be clear that the Gates Foundation made the world worse.

Update: Here is a video of Bill Gates promoting his letter.

Learning from gay unions

The NY Times pretends that research supports same-sex marriage:

A growing body of evidence shows that same-sex couples have a great deal to teach everyone else about marriage and relationships. ...

Notably, same-sex relationships, whether between men or women, were far more egalitarian than heterosexual ones. In heterosexual couples, women did far more of the housework; ... With same-sex couples, ... the partners tended to share the burdens far more equally.

So what exactly does this teach us? That wives should adopt the same interest (or lack of interest) as their husbands? That same-sex marriages are better because they are more egalitarian? If they find that same-sex couples often wear each other's clothes, will they say that regular husbands and wives should do the same? This is wacky stuff.

Single women do less housework

The UK BBC reports on a new study by UK labour economist Helene Couprie of Toulouse University:

And by examining information on more than 2,000 people, she concluded that on average, an employed woman does 15 hours a week of housework when she lives with her employed partner, up from 10 hours when single.

Meanwhile the men, who do seven hours while living alone, do only five when they co-habit.

The findings are partly, Ms Couprie suggests, due to influences that people have grown up with - where traditionally women have taken on the lion's share of domestic tasks.

She says that as long as children see their parents stick to certain tasks, such trends become hard to change.

Ultimately, she adds, "it is the work of social evolution".

And evolution takes time, she insists - perhaps another 20 years for the situation to really change in terms of the division of labour.

Her conclusions don't really follow from her data. If she really wanted to test whether housework habits are really based on seeing a parental division of labor, she could have looked at people reared by single parents or who otherwise grew up seeing a different division of labor.

She also could have looked at male roomates, and at female roommates. My guess is that a woman with a female roommate will do more housework than a single woman. If so, memory of seeing parental role models could have nothing to do with it.