Early on in their marriage, Melanie Sonsteng-Persons sat down with her husband Jeff and each partner listed out the household tasks they took care of on a regular basis. When they finished, his list had two or three items on it, while hers was pages and pages long.
Though Melanie had long heard from family and friends that she should be grateful for how much Jeff helped around the house compared to other men, the list-making exercise highlighted for her the discrepancy in expectations society tends to have about household labor based on gender.
“It feels like I'm supposed to be happy that you took out the trash when I just planned our whole lives for the next five years,” she said to him. “It’s emotionally exhausting to be in charge of all of this stuff.”
Jeff and Melanie’s experience isn’t unique. According to a recent survey by home care brands Dawn and Swiffer, the responsibility for most chores still falls primarily on one person in 65% of households. And that one person is usually a woman: on average, women spend two and a half work weeks (over 100 hours) more on household chores per year. Perhaps unsurprisingly, women are less satisfied than men with the division of labor in the homes as a result.
Even in younger households, where partners are more likely to profess egalitarian views about gender, the burden tends to fall disproportionately on women in heterosexual partnerships. On an average day, 49% of women report doing housework, compared to only 19% of men. This trend persists despite the fact that young women are also working more hours outside the home than they used to.
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Melanie & Jeff
For Melanie and Jeff, a married thirtysomething couple in California, the chore gap “has been an ongoing conversation since we started living with each other.”
Things came to a head three years ago. “I was like everybody list out what they do each day and Jeff's list was two or three things and my list was pages,” she says.
The couple has learned to see eye to eye. “The word that sticks out is partner,” Jeff says. “We're partners in this. I hear when you're overwhelmed or [when] things seem uneven so I do my best to listen and take those things into account.”
With a new baby in the home, they’ve had to find a new equilibrium. “We started realizing I can't do the chores that I was typically doing because I'm just so overwhelmed,” Melanie says.
Now Jeff does most of the physical labor around the house, like cleaning the floors. “I'm the brawn and she's the beauty and brains,” he says. For Melanie, the change has been positive for their relationship. “My love language is acts of service,” she says. “As long as you take care of stuff around the house, I will love you.”
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Melanie hopes this might change for the next generation. She and Jeff are adjusting to life with their five-month-old daughter Sophie Ann, and even if they haven’t done it perfectly in the past, both parents are interested in modeling the kind of partnership that can support a woman who has dreams and ambitions beyond the home. In this way, they provide a window into the 83% of parents who say that wanting to be good role models for their children has driven change in the division of chores in their relationship.
“I feel like it's important for young girls to see what it is like to be with someone who will split all the responsibility so there's not that expectation that the woman has to not accomplish her goals just so the house can be taken care of,” Melanie says.
There are certainly society-wide measures that would go a long way toward equalizing the playing field between men and women, some of which involve high-level change on the level of governmental and corporate policy. But it’s not an overstatement to say that the framework for equality starts at home: the gender wage gap begins with childhood allowances, coming into play as early as elementary school. Boys are, on average, given two times the allowance money that’s given to girls, and the tasks they perform (think mowing the lawn) tend to be more highly compensated than the work girls are tasked with (like cleaning the bathroom).
This is why parents like LaKiaya Evans are teaching their kids about household labor in a way that nips the chore gap in the bud. LaKiaya is a single mom whose non-traditional household is headed up by herself and another single mom and dear friend, Triniece Matthews. The two live together and co-parent LaKiaya’s one- and three-year-old daughters and Triniece’s 13-year-old son.
“We don't do gendered stuff around here,” LaKiaya says. “I am actively dismantling that in my household.”
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LaKiaya
LaKiaya Evans, a single parent in Houston with two daughters, believes everyone should pitch in at home. “This whole new trend of kids not doing chores is not happening in my house,” she says. “We do age appropriate chores for my children.”
LaKiaya co-dwells with Triniece, a single mom with a teenage son. Together, they’re modeling equality at home. “I don't believe in gender roles,” LaKiaya says. “I’m actively dismantling that in my household. I don't want my children growing up thinking, ‘Well, you're a woman, you're supposed to do this, and you're a man, so you're supposed to do that.’”
For LaKiaya, the solution starts at home. “People who fall into the chore gap, they were raised by people who fell into the chore gap. It's cyclical. And so I think that it’s important for roommates or lovers or whomever, if you're living together and sharing the space, to have those conversations up front.”
“We take pride in our home,” LaKiaya says. “We take pride in our appearance. We take pride, and this isn't for other people, this is for ourselves. That’s why we’re starting our kids off at such a young age with, ‘No, you're not just gonna leave a mess everywhere you go.’”
Ultimately, LaKiaya says, the issue is bigger than chores. “It's not just cleaning the house. It's how do you carry that holistic attitude of I'm gonna take care of every space that I go into as if it is mine and I'm leaving it for somebody else. You need to leave it better than you found it. If this isn't right, everything else is not going to be right.”
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To that end, LaKiaya and Triniece have given their kids age-appropriate chores from day one. LaKiaya is teaching her three-year-old to help put away laundry and clean up after her own messes, while Triniece’s teenage son is expected to help walk the dog, take out the trash, assist his mom with dishes and help LaKiaya watch the two younger girls.
LaKiaya and Triniece reflect a larger pattern of single moms being more effective at getting the whole household to pitch in on chores — according to the Dawn and Swiffer study, 75% of moms in two-parent homes say they take on the main responsibilities for household chores, but that number drops to 63% for single mothers.
Like single moms, LGBTQ+ families are also helping lead the way toward a smaller chore gap. People who identify as LGBTQ+ are more likely than their straight counterparts to take on half of the chores in their household, and they’re also more likely to talk about chores, which suggests that conversation may be linked to making progress in this area.
Erin Mazursky and Megan McGowan are intimately familiar with the relational issues that can arise from not being on the same page about household chores. The couple have been together for seven years, and used to have such significant conflict around who should do the dishes that they ended up taking their problem to a therapist.
They realized that the question of who would clean up after cooking wasn’t so much a question about dishes as it was about values. Erin had purposefully avoided learning how to cook as a younger person because she saw it as a gendered task in her own mother’s life growing up, and she didn’t want to continue that legacy. But since Megan is a big foodie who values home-cooked meals, she ended up feeling frustrated when Erin wouldn’t pitch in to do dishes after she’d put in the work to feed them both.
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Erin & Megan
Dishes were a flashpoint for Megan and Erin. “I'm a big foodie and she is not,” Megan says. “I would make all this food and then be like the person who cooks, doesn't clean up.” Erin remembers thinking This sucks. She cooks all the time and I have to clean up. I’m not ready for food to take up this much space in my life.
Eventually they talked things through. “She began to realize that cleaning up was meaningful to me,” Megan says. “And she explained to me that when she's working all day and then I make food and it's 8:30 at night now and there’s all these dishes—it's yet another thing to do. And that opened us up to being able to compromise.”
Now the couple works to better model mutuality in the home. “It's very fluid, the roles and chores we take on,” Erin says. “Not having roles biologically spelled out for you means you can create your own rules, and your own systems.” Megan agrees. “When you don't have prescribed gender roles, there’s an organic discovering of yourself, and what you like and are good at.”
The couple plays to their strengths when it comes to chores. “At this point, we know that there's certain things that the other person either is better at, or just can't tolerate,” Megan says. “Like changing the sheets. She hates it so much.”
“We've gotten much better at meeting each other in the middle, and enjoying what each other enjoys,” Erin says.
“Being a part of a family is a gift,” Megan says. “But also there's responsibilities that come with that, and contributions.” For Erin, chores play a role in teaching empathy and emotional intelligence. “You're a part of a society, or part of a family unit, and your daughters and sons need to be equally fluent in what mutuality looks like.”
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Big conversations about what they were really talking about when they talked about chores were crucial for the couple, and having the right tools on hand to make cleaning easier has helped reduce the strain, says Erin. She describes getting a dishwasher as a “game-changer” and calls their Swiffer “necessary.” These days, as the couple raises their two-month-old son, they’re leaning on frequent communication to make sure that the responsibilities of child-rearing and household labor are distributed fairly.
“It's not 50/50 in the sense that I wash the dishes three days a week and she washes the dishes four days a week,” says Erin. “But it does require checking in with each other a lot to say, ‘Are you feeling supported by me right now?’”
The side benefit of all this checking in is that it creates a stronger bond. This experience reflects a broader truth about chore-sharing: it can make relationships better for all those involved. 52% of people living with their spouses report that seeing their division of household labor change since the beginning of the pandemic has made them feel closer. Another 45% say it’s given them more time together romantically.
And the benefits aren’t limited to romantic partners. Nidiya Shaktar’s 66- and 71-year-old parents have been living with herself, her husband and her two children for more than ten years. In their home, every person has tasks they chip in on. Nidiya’s parents make breakfast and lunch, the kids help with cleaning, her husband handles financial decisions, and Nidiya functions as “master chef” and house manager who makes sure nothing falls through the cracks.
Nidiya believes the everyone-pitches-in model that her family operates by is shaping her children into people who care for one another and see themselves as contributing members of a community, a value she says was passed down to her by her dad. It’s an experience shared by many families in the pandemic: parents whose kids helped out during the onset of Covid-19 saw their kids become more respectful and grateful.
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Nidiya
With three generations living under one roof, Nidiya’s household requires all hands on deck to get things done. “Whatever they can do for their age, they try to contribute, as a family,” she says. “Everybody has a role in the house.”
“It's a blessing for my kids to grow up with their grandparents,” Nidiya says. Her son Neal says he wants to be a chef when he grows up because of his grandmother. “Kids, they learn from what you do, not what you say,” Nidiya says. “My mom shares her life, her challenges, with them. And they learn a lot from that.”
“The way I was raised, women tend to do certain kinds of household work and men do others,” Nidiya says. “But when raising my kids I wanted to break that.” Her son takes charge of the Swiffer, sweeps, vacuums, and cooks. Her daughter believes everything her brother does, she can do, too. “I always tell her women are equally strong to men and she can do everything,” Nidiya says.
Nidiya’s father taught her to be engaged in the community. “Growing up, I saw how much he helped other people. When you love somebody you show them by your actions. I got that from my dad.”
“I think it all starts with the family,” Nidiya says. “One thing that we follow at home and we teach our kids is that it’s better to be kind than to be right. Imagine everybody being kind to each other. It has a ripple effect. Joy is contagious.”
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Nidiya comes from a more traditional set of roles around gender and family: she and her husband met through an arranged marriage before immigrating from India to the United States. But when it comes to the division of labor in her own household, she’s been happy to see her son gravitating toward the kitchen and takes it as a sign that he and his sister feel free to explore what they’re good at, regardless of gender.
Perhaps most meaningful to her is the knowledge that her kids’ aspirations are being shaped by how the family does life together. Her daughter recently told Nidiya that she wants her mom to live with her when she grows up, just as Nidiya’s parents live with them now.
“Kids learn from what you do, not what you say,” Nidiya says.
All in all, shrinking the chore gap is an ongoing challenge for most families, regardless of their size or background — Melanie and Jeff joke that it’s been a “six year conversation,” while Erin and Megan note that their responsibilities are “very fluid.” But the more families decide that the benefits within the home are worth it, the more the next generation will get to inherit a world a little bit more equitable than the one that came before.
“It's not just cleaning the house,” says LaKiaya. “It's about how you carry that holistic attitude everywhere that says, ‘I'm gonna take care of every space that I go into as if I'm leaving it for somebody else.’”
