Getting married is a high point in most women's lives, but it comes with at least one burden they may not have expected - extra housework. According to a study from the
University of Michigan, the average woman adds seven hours a week to her weekly burden simply by getting hitched.
But the man gets the best deal out of this equation, saving himself an hour of chores around the home.
The researchers note we've come a long way since the old days when necessities like cleaning the floors, doing the laundry or taking care of the kids was considered "woman's work." But inequities remain.
"It's a well-known pattern," admits Frank Stafford, of the university's Institute for Social Research. "There's still a significant reallocation of labor that occurs at marriage - men tend to work more outside the home, while women take on more of the household labour. And the situation gets worse for women when they have children."
Stafford asked his subjects to keep a time diary about how they spent their hours, and questioned both sexes about the amount of cooking, cleaning and basic work they did keeping their houses in order.
They discovered that single women only performed about 12 hours of chores a week. But their married counterparts, especially older females in their 60s and 70s, did twice that amount. Women with three kids spent a good 28 hours getting everything done they felt was needed. But for married men with the same number of children, the workload was just 10 hours.
It's only natural that kids translate into additional work, and the more people in a home the more work there will inevitably be for those who live there. But the researchers suggest that most of that burden still falls on women, and that men don't contribute as much mostly because they're absent at work.
Still, things have improved since they did a similar study in 1976. Back then, women were forced to perform about 26 hours of housework a week, while men contributed just six. Now the weight scales have balanced a bit, with wives averaging 17 hours and husbands about 13.
And those behind the numbers contend guys don't get off easy by getting married. Their workload increases once they're united in matrimony, and the wife says the inevitable 'Dear, got a minute?'"
"Marriage is no longer a man's path to less housework," Stafford concludes.
Boyfriends do more housework than husbands