Are studies about labour division in the household even reliable?

SpamFriedMice · 2025-07-21T05:51:47+00:00

Men are more likely to work overtime. Men travel farther to work, and are more likely to have to do overnights on the road. And on top of this do all the more physically demanding jobs and are more likely to be outside in the summer heat, winter cold and rain.

So men spend less time at home, and are more exhausted when they get there.

And women want a medal for tossing in a load of laundry.

Extension-Humor4281 · 2025-07-21T05:37:59+00:00

Been hypothesizing that for a while now. Men and women also simply have different standards for what "clean" is, in my admittedly biased experience. Women will frequently hyper-fixate until a space is absolutely spotless, whereas the guy will clean away dirt with soap and water and call it good. Obviously there are exceptions to this on both sides, but I'm just speaking generally.

Former-Dragonfly2226 · 2025-07-21T05:53:42+00:00

The studies that I’m aware of are usually of couples with children. They usually ignore that men generally work at their job for ~40 hours per week, while women either don’t work or work part time. If these aren’t taken into account, and if a woman does 5 hours of cleaning per week, and the man does 0-1 hours per week, then it looks like the man isn’t pulling his weight and the woman is slaving away.

Working_Parsley_2364 · 2025-07-21T05:28:00+00:00

I think the main issue with these is that these studies usually do not take into account the tasks that are mostly performed by men and that feminists don't want women to do. When you only take into account things such as cleaning, cooking, laundry and taking care of children and not count things such as various repairs and maintanance you will end up with skewed results.

Suspicious-Sleep5227 · 2025-07-21T06:03:23+00:00

I think one aspect that gets overlooked is that when it comes to household labor, men value simplicity while women like to indulge their “nesting” instinct. Furthermore, we all know what “compromise” looks like in a heterosexual relationship. That word turns into a euphemism for do what the woman wants while the man has to muzzle it. In the beginning, the woman will tolerate the man’s way of conducting their domestic duties but after a time his simple plan for household labor gets turned into Operation Overlord and he gets dragged along for the ride. Whereas he might make it a point to do laundry once a week, do general pickup of things and tolerate a little clutter here and there, she wants the house looking pristine at all times to include regular mopping, dusting and vacuuming because, you know, just in case her mother in law makes an unexpected appearance.

So I think the problem with these surveys is that they fail to answer the deeper question of what do men and women value in terms of running and maintaining a household?

LoopyPro · 2025-07-21T06:48:18+00:00

They quantify their labor in 'hours worked', which is a terrible way to measure production. This simultaneously diminishes the value of high-paying jobs.

This also means that a man can just choose to take hours to complete a task and then claim to be productive. Oh wait, that's called weaponized incompetence.

IceCorrect · 2025-07-21T06:40:56+00:00

Majority of those "studies" are self reported, so if men do X and for him is the right thing to do, he wont consider/record it as job

johnnycarrotheid · 2025-07-21T10:03:50+00:00

"Hours worked" as a measuring tool, is just dishonest.

It's laughable to anyone that's ever had a job. We've all worked somewhere with someone that can spend a lot of time looking busy, but doing nothing, and conversely someone on the same "hours used" that is ran into the ground 🤷

"hours used" is laughable as a measuring stick. Not every hour is equally as valuable.

It's why we have different wage structures 🤷

Angryasfk · 2025-07-21T07:49:29+00:00

I’d take them with a sack of salt!!!

Most people have automatic washing machines, and many (most?) have dryers. In my city people still mostly hang washing on the line and save the dryer for wet days, but I’m aware that’s not the case in many places. It takes 5 minutes to load a washing machine, add the detergent and set it running. And 5 minutes at most to load it into a separate dryer. Running a dishwasher is similar. But how are these “calculated”? The runtime of these machines? Of course it’s mostly men who mow the lawn, or do basic maintenance on the car. But these don’t count apparently.

In truth, these claims are really just spin. And are obviously spin.

KochiraJin · 2025-07-21T08:31:35+00:00

Any study that uses hours worked in a household as a measure is dishonest. They make the false assumption that the value of that work is equal. It is not, value is subjective. The wife and husband are going to have different ideas on which chores are the worst and which are the best. This easily creates situations where a longer duration chore is more tolerable than a shorter one. You can't measure this with time use studies.

_WutzInAName_ · 2025-07-21T10:32:14+00:00

Those studies are garbage. They typically don’t take into account the man’s more demanding job, yard work, auto work, or the man’s preferences for how often or thoroughly household work should be done. There’s no objective standard for the amount and frequency of household tasks that should be done, so the complaints about men not doing enough of the housework reflect the arbitrary preferences of complaining women.

805falcon · 2025-07-21T12:10:26+00:00

Not only that but I’m confident it’s a downright fabrication.

In my former marriage, I was absolutely the clean freak and 1000% more anal about cleanliness. If anyone was spending extra time on the details it was me. And yet, the old bag never missed an opportunity to talk about how much she did around the house while totally disregarding my efforts as un-noteworthy

In other words, if you were to ask her who did the majority of housework she’d have laughed at you having the audacity to even ask, when in reality it was likely me (and that’s after two hour daily commutes).

shopinhower · 2025-07-21T06:23:40+00:00

Just another made up statistic. Like rape statistics.

How would the government even know what goes on in people’s private households?

TheSummitSherpa · 2025-07-21T15:49:32+00:00

My father spent all yesterday putting up a new fence on his day off from work. My mother did one load of laundry and doesn't work. My mother complained this morning that my father didn't take out the trash last night.

antifeminist3 · 2025-07-22T15:34:17+00:00

These studies use a feminist bias: usually only talking about housework/childcare. This ignores the fact that the reason women do more housework/childcare is because the man does more of the bringing home the money work. Ignoring men's labor is a female oriented bias which makes people think of only women's housework/childcare. Then feminist argue that men should do equal housework/childcare. These would actually mean that men would do most of the work.

Even studies which include paid labor, housework and childcare are still biased. Because they only include the types of unpaid labor that women tend to do and ignore the types of unpaid labor that men tend to do: yardwork, snowshoveling, lawmowing, maintenance outside, repairs and maintenance inside, errands with care (done more by men). These feminist studies are dependent on ignoring men's labor and therefore feminists are guilty of ignoring men's labor while accusing people of ignoring women's labor.

AbysmalDescent · 2025-07-21T19:16:03+00:00

I suspect that there would generally be a pre-existing bias in this kind of data collection, in that a lot of the work that men do around the house might often be downplayed or dismissed outright because it's not considered their primary task or because it is just extra work being done by men(therefor not as meaningful or effortful). It's ironic, because this would effectively be data collected to try to present the argument about women's "invisible labor" but that requires treating a lot of the extra work that men do, both physical or emotional, at home as invisible in order to get to the "desired" result.

griii2 · 2025-07-22T08:28:01+00:00

I did some research and wrote this post couple years back:

https://np.reddit.com/r/MensRights/s/UZe8hjvNsx

gmohan · 2026-04-29T05:33:52+00:00

Father/husband of 3+ decades here: Dismissing men’s household labor as mowing the lawn, cleaning gutters and assembling Ikea bookcases is as demeaning as dismissing women’s roles as loading washers and dishwashers. MANY of the tasks I’ve done in a house over the years have involved multi-day mental and physical puzzles, emergency repairs of health-threatening situations, protracted research, steep learning curves, trial-and-error, and injuries that include surgeries. AND my partner also shouldered similarly complex and prolonged stress-labyrinths involving children that are seldom quantified, either (though there is one good study about this invisible psychological work), all while going through biological shifts that frankly would have floored me. It’s not tasks, per se, and it’s not time, only. Let’s not pretend it can be reduced to a ledger based on self-reporting surveys. The only litmus test is whether you can support each other through times when the burden isn’t equal and get to the end of the day and say, well WE made it, how can we get it done again tomorrow?

Main-Tiger8537 · 2025-07-21T06:43:47+00:00

no... there is no differentiation between liberal and conservative households which ignores consent... similiar story with political representation...

Jimithyashford · 2025-07-21T14:14:41+00:00

The thing you're talking about, where a partner has really high standards and is really nitpicky so it's not so much that the other partner doesn't do chores, but that they don't spend as much time do it to a crazy high standards....

That does happen, but that's not just a woman thing, plenty of guys are really anal about things being just so. The reverse is also true, where plenty of people "do the chores" but do a really shit sloppy job of it, and the other partner has to some along as re-do it or just do it themselves if they want it done to a reasonable standard, and that also can apply to both genders.

So really, whatever truth is in this observation is probably a wash in terms of it being a men's rights issue.

ValuableSpare4095 · 2025-07-21T16:10:21+00:00

Honestly, I work a full time job, maintain the outside of two houses (elderly parents) and volunteer for two organizations. My wife...not so much. But if we just talk about the inside work, it looks as if she runs laps around me.

Title	Are studies about labour division in the household even reliable?
Author	RiP_Nd_tear
Upvotes	104
Comments	98
Date	July 21, 2025 5:20 AM UTC (11 months ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/1m5advc/are_studies_about_labour_division_in_the/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/are-studies-about-labour-division-in-the-household.1557762 https://theredarchive.com/post/1557762

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