COLUMBUS – Gender equality is a big issue in the work place but it doesn’t begin at home, according to a new study by researchers at Ohio State.
The new report, published online in the journal Sex Roles, indicates that, when it comes to household chores, women are still handling most of the dirty work.
The study found that when both parents are “enjoying” a day off from work, the woman in the household still handles most domestic chores and childcare while men spend twice as long relaxing.
“On workdays, parents are more evenly splitting housework and childcare. It’s very much ‘all hands on deck’ but when there is more time available on the weekend and parents are not so pressed to get everything done, then we see the emergence of gendered patterns and inequality where women do a lot more housework and childcare while he leisures,” said Jill Yavorsky, who received her Ph.D. at Ohio State and is now an assistant professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
She worked on the study with Claire Kamp Dush, lead author of the study and associate professor of human sciences at OSU, and Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan, also a professor of human sciences at Ohio State.
The study looked at couples three months after the birth of a child and found that, on days both parents weren’t working, women get an average of about 46 to 49 minutes to relax and do nothing while their man handles chores, while men got about 100 minutes of downtime.
The research included 52 couples who participated in the New Parents Project, an Ohio State study of mostly highly educated, white, dual-earner couples from the Columbus area who were having their first child.
Researchers asked the couples to complete their own time diaries for a workday and a non-workday during the third trimester of the woman’s pregnancy and about three months after the baby’s birth.
On workdays after the baby was born, the amount of time women and men spent doing housework and child care was more equal, though women still did slightly more work.
But men made up for it on non-workdays when the amount of time they spent in leisure activities actually doubled – from 47 minutes while their partner was pregnant — to 101 minutes three months after the birth.