Researchers have now calculated that employed husbands and wives should each do less than half of the household chores -- 45.8 percent each to be precise -- if they want to keep their personal distress levels at a minimum.
The remaining 8.4 percent, presumably, would have to be tended to by other family members or guests, or a maid -- or go undone.
Chloe E. Bird, Ph.D., of Brown University, writing in the March issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, determined the "ideal share" of household chores after surveying 1,256 adults, about 51 percent of them women. She related men's and women's housework performance data with their self-reports of psychological well-being and distress, adjusting for prior mental health status.
For persons who identified their occupation as keeping house, the ideal share is about 80 percent, she reports. No men in the study placed themselves in the "keeping house" category.
Bird found that it's not the amount of cleaning, cooking, shopping, doing laundry and dishes, and taking care of children that women do that accounts for their higher levels of anxiety, demoralization, depression and worry: it's how unevenly those chores are distributed between wives and their husbands.
"Although performing very large amounts of household labor increases depression, the effect is insignificant after taking into account the division of household labor," Bird says.
She found abundant evidence of housework inequity throughout her sample. Overall, men reported they performed on average 42.3 percent of the housework, compared to the 68.1 percent that women said they did.
Among married respondents, the differences were even greater than among the general population. Wives perform more than twice as many hours of household labor as their husbands and report they do more than 70 percent of the housework, compared to 36.7 percent that husbands reported.
The study provides no support for thinking that men and women have different levels of vulnerability to the impact of housework on their distress levels. Neither men nor women were more vulnerable to psychological distress when performing the same amounts or same share of household work, Bird found.
A more equitable division of household work could reduce women's distress, Bird concludes, without increasing men's distress levels because it would result in higher perceived levels of social support, which reduces psychological distress.
The research was supported by grants from the Kaiser Family Foundation and the National Institute of Mental Health.
The Journal of Health and Social Behavior is a peer-reviewed quarterly publication of the American Sociological Association. For information about the Journal, contact its editor, John Mirowsky, 614-688-8673.
Posted by the Center for the Advancement of Health http://www.cfah.org. For informatioln about the Center, contact Petrina Chong pchong@cfah.org, 202-387-2829.
Journal
Journal of Health and Social Behavior