In the fourth episode of Thread the Needle, Donna explores why women are still stuck doing most of the housework and uncovers a perplexing research finding—splitting chores fairly does not create happier couples.
Episode Guests:
Kenneth Matos, Organizational Psychologist and Lead People Scientist at Culture Amp, New York, NY
Krystal Shaw and Amanda Covington
Relevant Links:
Families and Work Institute Study: “Modern Families: Same- and Different-Sex Couples Negotiating at Home”
Harvard Business Review: "Rethink What You 'Know' About High-Achieving Women"
Pew Research Study: Sharing chores a key to good marriage, say majority of married adults
US Department of Labor Statistics: "Working Mothers Issue Brief"
US Bureau of Labor Statistics: "American Time Use Survey by Sex"
Thanks for listening to Thread the Needle, a monthly podcast that explores the meeting place between feminist ideals and the realities of women’s lives. If you have a story you’d like to see featured in a future episode, please email podcast@theneedle.co.
Follow Thread the Needle on Instagram @theneedlepod.
Thanks to Molly Bloom of American Public Radio for mentoring this project!
Host and Executive Producer: Donna Cleveland
Theme song by: Meara Oberdieck
Original music by: Taylor Ross
Episode artwork by: Chosie Titus
Recording and audio mastering by: Cody Olivas, Nicholas Naioti
Additional music from: Free Internet Archive
Episode 4 transcript:
DONNA CLEVELAND (HOST): There’s this question on my mind, so naturally, I decided to head to Walmart to look for answers.
So here’s my question: How do most couples split up their housework? I was expecting a lot of this:
INTERVIEWEE: Girls always do more shit than boys.
INTERVIEWEE: She says she does most of it. But we do try to split it some.
CLEVELAND: But I also heard.
INTERVIEWEE: We play cribbage to see who does the dishes or laundry.
INTERVIEWEE: Well I live with a couple of cats, and they do the dishes for me.
INTERVIEWEE: Would you like to be my maid? I think that would be wonderful.
CLEVELAND: Some people seemed satisfied with the way things were.
INTERVIEWEE: It works out well. I don’t feel resentful that I do most of it, because he does what he can.
CLEVELAND: And others were fed up.
INTERVIEWEE: A woman can’t do it all. She may try, but she shouldn’t have to do it all.
INTERVIEWEE: Most of the time women get stuck doing everything. I don’t think it’s fair.
CLEVELAND: So here’s the question: What’s the difference between the couples who seem happy with their division of chores at home and the ones who don’t? And more importantly, how do I get my husband to do the dishes?
[music break…]
CLEVELAND: You’re listening to Thread the Needle, a monthly podcast that explores the meeting place between feminist ideals and the realities of women’s lives. Thread the Needle is a show for anyone who’s trying to figure out how feminism fits into their experience of the world. I’m your host Donna Cleveland, and in this episode, I’ll share my findings on a topic that’s close to my heart—the dirty business of how couples divide housework.
I’m married to a man, and over the years I’ve noticed that I keep falling into the role of doing most of the stereotypically female chores around the house. For me, this has felt distinctly not OK. My husband Tyler and I both have full time jobs, and so in my mind, we’d ideally split up the chores 50/50.
After we moved in together, I broached the conversation with him, and he quickly let me know that he also thought we should split chores equally. I could tell that he was genuine, he wasn’t intentionally leaving chores for me.
I’ve gone back and forth on how to handle this problem. I’ve tried not cleaning or cooking, but that really only bothered me, as Tyler didn’t really mind living in a messy house and eating a bunch of Taco Johns. I’ve tried being cool with it, because I really didn’t want to become one of those old married couples who bicker over seemingly nothing. I’ve also tried fighting about it, marching into the TV room ready to duke it out when I’d come home to a sink still full of dishes or an unmade bed. Fighting over household chores is common in many relationships, and it may sound pretty harmless. But in my experience, it’s kind of like a bug bite that you itch so much that you let it get infected. What started out as no big deal can begin to impact your quality of life.
What frustrates me the most about it all is how avoidable the problem seems. If you ask Tyler, he’d say I have a relentless fixation with the dishes and need to relax. If you ask me, I’d say he should just do all the chores I ask him to do, and be less of a contrarian.
Tyler and I weren’t getting anywhere with our arguments, so I decided to talk to married friends of mine who, as far as I knew, had never fought about the dishes. I thought that maybe with enough questioning, I could figure out the secret to their domestic bliss.
[Krystal and Amanda singing…]CLEVELAND: That’s Amanda, and that’s Krystal. These two live together in Austin, Texas, have been married for almost 7 years, and have a one-year old daughter named Henri. They started dating over a decade ago.
AMANDA COVINGTON: I met her sister first through a mutual friend and I was at a dinner party and Krystal came over to say hello. I thought she was extremely beautiful, She looked like an angel to me. I’m not much of a believer in religious things, that’s just what she looked like to me.
CLEVELAND: More than ten years later, and not much has changed.
KRYSTAL SHAW: We’re really appreciative of each other, probably like aggressively appreciative
CLEVELAND: After a little questioning, my suspicion was confirmed: Have you ever fought about the dishes?
KRYSTAL: No.
CLEVELAND: I found myself wondering if the fact that they are a same-sex couple that doesn’t have the baggage of gender roles that so many different sex couples come into relationships with, had anything to do with their happy dynamic at home.
This line of thinking led me to an organizational psychologist named Ken Matos who set out to answer this same question a few years ago. I got Matos on the phone to tell me about the study he conducted inspired by the following questions:
KENNETH MATOS: What is it that same-sex couples might be doing right? Is there something that can be learned or applied more broadly in thinking about how couples divide workplace responsibilities, especially around childcare.
CLEVELAND: To answer these questions, in 2015 Matos headed up a large-scale study with 225 couples, including same sex and mixed gender couples. In all of the couples, both people worked outside the home. This created a controlled environment to see if in fact same-sex couples divide labor in a different way, and if so, to see if there were lessons we could glean from these differences. Here’s what he found:
MATOS: What we found was with the different sex couples, things very much lined up with gender expectations, so men tended to earn more, work more hours, and do stereotypically male things. Women tended to do stereotypically female chores, work less hours, and make less money. When we looked at same-sex couples, what we found was that the amount of money you make and the number of hours you spend at work didn't predict what you ended up doing very well.
CLEVELAND: If hours worked and money earned didn’t predict housework with same-sex couples, what did?
MATOS: There really was very little consistency within same sex couples about how they were dividing things and the few places where we did find significant results, it was just, it was more towards equity and sharing than it was toward either person being the primary doer of everything.
CLEVELAND: Matos found that the sharing of household tasks was most striking when you threw kids into the mix. When asked about routine childcare, 74 percent of same-sex couples said they shared duties compared to just 38 percent of straight couples. That means that for the majority of straight couples, one parent is the primary caretaker. So Matos was beginning to find answers to his initial question.
MATOS: What is it that same-sex couples might be doing right?
CLEVELAND: Same sex couples were not using gender roles to split up housework and they were sharing more of the workload at home. However, I was about to learn that this may actually have nothing to do with why Krystal and Amanda had never fought about the dishes. But before I go any further, I want to pause and put this study in context by taking a look at the big picture. Who is doing housework in America? Let’s take a look at the latest numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to find out.
On an average day, women spend nearly 2.5 hours on housework compared to the nearly 1.5 hours men spend. That’s a whole extra hour women are spending that they could be using to get more done at work, or, I don’t know, enjoy themselves.
According to the same survey, Women also spend more than twice as much time caring for other members of the household than men do.
Some of you may be wondering—are stay-at-home moms, who let’s say have agreed to take on more chores while their husbands work, inflating this statistic? The answer is no.
In reality, a higher percentage of moms, 70 percent to be exact, are in the workforce compared to the national average for women, which is 57 percent. With moms working at such a high rate, stay-at-home moms can’t account for why women are stuck with more housework in America.
Here’s something that confused me about this. While inequality between men and women when it comes to housework persists, according to a recent Pew Research Study, more than half of married U.S. adults say sharing household chores is “very important” to a successful marriage. So why aren’t we actually sharing them fairly?
Matos says that this comes down to ideals versus reality. More people identify today with the ideal of an egalitarian relationship, but when it comes to applying those ideals to real-life scenarios, those views don’t always hold up.
MATOS: Male-female couples often talk about valuing equality when things are ideal, but when you start throwing in obstacles, they revert back to, “Well the man is going to work and the woman is going to stay home.”
CLEVELAND: A recent study of 25,000 Harvard Business School graduates ranging from millennials to baby boomers clearly illustrates how, under pressure, we default back to gender norms, in essence putting women back in the kitchen.
While both male and female Harvard MBA graduates expressed similar levels of career ambition, more than half of graduating men expected their careers to take precedence over their spouses. Most graduating women, however, expected their careers to be just as important as their partners. When asked how these expectations held up to reality, men said their expectations were met, while women had lower career success and satisfaction. The same trend held true when it came to childcare.
When looking at the Gen X and baby boomer population of Harvard grads, most men expected their partners to take primary responsibility for childcare while only half of women expected to take on that role. Whether they liked it or not, however, more than two-thirds of women ended up doing most of the child rearing. While many millennial women haven’t yet had children, the future for them will likely follow a similar trend. Among millennial women, 42% expect to take responsibility for childcare compared to 66% of millennial men who expect them to.
This study suggests something very interesting, if not sinister. While many of us like the ideal of an equal partnership, we’re still recreating the gender roles we claim to have moved beyond.
And this brings us back to Krystal and Amanda. Before meeting Amanda, Krystal had only dated men.
CLEVELAND: Did you ever feel when dating men like you were put into a certain role because of being a woman?
KRYSTAL: No. I do have a very sort of typical feminine expression physically, and I definitely have had experiences that I know that Amanda hasn’t had in terms of just feeling uncomfortable in certain situations or feeling unheard by men. And so I definitely experienced some of that in dating. The closest that I was willing to come to gender stereotypes was that I'd let him pay for dinner, but I love a free meal so I would let anybody pay for dinner.
CLEVELAND: I love you Krystal.
CLEVELAND: When Krystal met Amanda, she was confronted with some of her own assumptions about gender that she hadn’t been fully aware of.
KRYSTAL: I had never dated a lady, and so I thought that women had a lot of feelings, which they do. But then I met Amanda, and she did have a lot of feelings, but she was also really articulate about talking about them. I found out later everybody has a lot of feelings just some people can't talk about them very well.
CLEVELAND: While Krystal has learned to talk about feelings, Amanda admits:
AMANDA: I do have a lot of them, she was right
CLEVELAND: Amanda’s openness about her feelings is pretty much where her stereotypically female qualities end.
AMANDA: I have a pretty non binary gender expression, I don't look like a typical female, I don't behave like a typical female. So on a personal level, I don't carry a lot of that around, I don't identify with the typical female experience in the world, I have a totally different experience than what a lot of other women I know have.
CLEVELAND: Interestingly, Amanda’s early modeling of gender roles was much more traditional than Krystal’s
KRYSTAL: I grew up in a super traditional family in terms of gender. My mom was always the primary breadwinner, my dad would work kind of here or there he was actually a real estate agent but only in our tiny community, so he was mostly a stay at home dad and so he would take us to school and I think they shared the load of like making dinner relatively equally. I don't quite remember who was cooking. And so I got to watch all of that sort of play out in a not super traditional way and then my dad passed away when I was ten and so then it was just my mom and she was single for the whole time that I was still at home. So I didn't have a whole like a very traditional model, I didn't really have a model at all. I felt like it was just what it was.
So I think it was it was very helpful to me to see that my family was different from other families. It wasn't so much that I thought that my family needed d to be just like the one that I grew up in so much as it really offered me the example of all families being able to be different.
CLEVELAND: Amanda’s family on the other hand, still expects certain norms from her and Krystal.
AMANDA: My mom definitely thinks that the mom should stay at home like she doesn't understand why everybody doesn't do that.
CLEVELAND: From talking to Krystal and Amanda and to Matos, I saw a theme forming. The inability to fall back on gender roles left same-sex couples more free to create their own blueprint for the relationship.
MATOS: With same sex couples, you start off going, well we can never be this cultural ideal, it's impossible, we are not male-female couple so we have to figure it out from the very beginning. And I think that as always sets same sex couples free to investigate and look for more satisfying scenarios with a little less baggage and an opportunity to have some more constructive conversations.
CLEVELAND: But one result of the study surprised Matos. While same-sex couples skewed more toward equality and didn’t divide chores along gender lines, they still divided labor more than you would think, and not always evenly.
MATOS: I was surprised to see just how much division of labor there really was in same-sex couples and realizing that division of labor is not itself the problem.
CLEVELAND: This is where things get interesting. According to the study, equality wasn’t an indicator for relationship satisfaction.
MATOS: We asked people whether or not they were satisfied with the way things were divided and the only thing that predicted satisfaction was whether or not they had a conversation about what they wanted early in the relationship and so the people who bit their tongues had something they wanted to say but didn't, were the ones who were unhappy.
CLEVELAND: The study found no difference in satisfaction between same sex and mixed sex couples. So the question of: What are same sex couples doing right? Doesn’t have such a clear answer.
MATOS: What all couples need is equality in voice, they need equality in decision making, but the decisions they make don't all have to say, ‘You do half the work and I do half the work,’ it has to say, ‘We're each doing the work that we both think that we should be doing.’
CLEVELAND: This lines up with Krystal and Amanda’s experience. When asked, they were quick to let me know that they actually don’t split their housework fairly.
AMANDA: It changes, I mean it's never going to be one hundred percent equal. Somebody is always going to have to work more because of a reason and that might be like that year and then the next year it won't. Krystal always has more time to pick up the house and part of that is that she works from home and she works probably as many hours as I do if not more sometimes but when she gets up to go in the kitchen or do something or take a break she's in the house and so she just ends up picking up and cleaning up more than I do because I'm gone ten hours out of the day. So for me, that feels like an imbalance and we've talked about that in the last year and a half since I've had a job where I commute.
And I don't like how that feels because I feel like she's pulling way more weight than I am around the house and you know I think we just know that it won't always be like this and then, the balance will shift back in another direction like you can't take one year out of your entire life you're going to spend together and be like 'oh this is our relationship is now imbalanced', you know that's like saying, 'oh I ate a cheeseburger today and so I'm nutritionally imbalanced', you're not.”
CLEVELAND: Amanda and Krystal communicate regularly and look at not only what’s more practical but what each person wants to do on a regular basis.
AMANDA: So for me it's just like alright well you're good at this one thing and I'm good at this one thing so we'll divide it up like that or I hate this chore and you don't mind it, so we'll do that until we reach a chore that we both hate and then we just have to do it. So our life just sort of from my perspective, just became more structured around questions like that as opposed to you're a man or you are a woman and so this is what is expected of you.
CLEVELAND: We’ve uncovered a big finding. While same sex couples have broken out of gender roles, they’re not any more satisfied with the breakdown of chores than other couple types.
MATOS: The people who didn't voice their desires were the ones who were least happy and those tended to be women in relationships with men and so I think one of the key things that women should do is voice what they want early and have a vision of what they want. I think a lot of times people allow things to form organically and then you have to backtrack and that backtracking is harder than going into something and saying this is where I want this to go. But I also think that there's a responsibility I meant to ask. Is this what you want? As well as saying what they want? I think men are trained generally to respond to complaints or things said to them, they're not generally told, 'Hey, you should be empathetic and notice whether or not somebody may or may not be happy, engage in that conversation in advance' and so I think a lot of men are waiting to be told what's wrong, and they're allowing the process to continue going down the road that ends up with women doing things that they don't necessarily want to be doing.
CLEVELAND: At this point in the interview with Matos, I had a hard time hearing women take all the blame for this unhealthy dynamic. Weren’t men the ones benefiting from the current system and therefore likely to resist any attempts to change it even if women did speak up more? When I asked Matos about this, he challenged the idea that men are benefitting from the current system, and painted a more complex picture.
MATOS: In terms of money and power, men do benefit by having the wife to support their careers and opportunities. They suffer in that they end up with lower health outcomes, they are more likely to be depressed or sad especially after divorce because women tend to hold on to all the social relationships and so in the divorce the man's left alone and the woman actually gets to keep the support network, so she emotionally comes out of it a lot more healthy and so there's this interesting dynamic of again because men aren't supposed to value their emotional health they're not supposed to engage with conversations about their physical health, they're supposed to be stoic they are not able to really recognize the ways in which they're actually being hurt by the scenario and so again that sort of re-anchors them into I'm going to keep being this kind of person rather than opening the door to the diverse expression of gender and role that women have conceptually but not necessarily in reality again because they're still chained back to men who are still trying to live up to these much more rigid roles.
CLEVELAND: According to Matos, gender roles are more rigid for men, making it difficult for them to break free. If you want proof of this, Matos said you need look no further than how our society treats gay men.
MATOS: Gay men have to face not being able to live up to that masculine ideal the moment they say they're gay, because that masculine ideals are very much built around not being gay. I mean being gay is the ultimate insult for a lot of straight men still.So I think that when you come out and you accept that you're going to have a relationship with another man, there is sort of a breaking of a lot of your sense of what's it going to be. To give a personal example, I think of my wedding, as being an interesting experience because our parents sort of didn't know what to do. They were like what is a gay wedding look like? And so it could be anything because it could never be one of us in a white dress and one of us in a tux, at least the way we manage our gender identities, and so the door was open.
CLEVELAND: In Matos’ opinion, if all men could break free the way gay men have been forced to, we’d be a lot better off.
MATOS: I personally believe that a lot of the reason why feminism has sort of stalled in a lot of places is there isn't enough conversation about how men and masculinity need to change to allow men to hold onto a sense of, you know, I am a man and I manly in this society but that means I clean up after my kids. Those two things have to be fused and right now they're still kept very much apart, masculinity is too much defined by not being these feminine things, and so that creates a huge tension for them that women end up having to clean up the mess around because then the things don't get cleaned at all.
I see men and women when they form couples chained to one another the lives they live are going to influence the lives their partner lives and then each change to this idea by their femininity or masculinity. Women have managed to pull the concept of femininity out of the ground that spike's no longer holding that little task to it but they can move it.
Men are still attached to what that concept of masculinity is, it's firmly embedded in the ground, and so women can only go as far as those chains between them, men and that idea of masculinity will allow. So even though we had this new expansive idea of what women can be, if men are still trapped in a small gender identity, women really can't achieve their fullness because they keep getting yanked back by the fact that men are not as free to be different yet.
CLEVELAND: I don’t know about you, but I heard a lot of good news in this. At first I didn’t want to hear that women should speak up more. I was speaking up, and I only saw it leading to more fights. But finally, I was beginning to realize that part of the problem was that I was going into the conversation with a negative view toward men. Now seeing that men are stuck in gender roles and are suffering because of it gave me a new sense of compassion.
And as it turned out, I had some introspection to do around the way I was communicating. I had slipped into treating an adversarial mindset, and it had become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Don’t get me wrong, I know that my frustrations have been warranted, but acting hostile about it was only making it worse.
So I began trying to talk about housework when I wasn’t already pissed off. Right away I noticed my results were a million times better when I came into conversations while we were having a good time together and feeling at ease.
Even with all our progress, my husband, like many men, just isn’t as likely to take the lead on cooking or cleaning as I am, even though he’s very willing to help when I bring it up. This still bothers me, but I’m seeing that we’re moving in the right direction, and seeing progress is encouraging. Because if I learned anything from Matos, it’s that we all benefit when we can communicate about how we want to live together. If you’re in a couple, you can choose at any point to revisit what that looks like. For me, right now, that means aiming for more teamwork, and to relieve some of the pressure, leaving room in the budget for a monthly cleaning service. I’ll leave you with this perspective from Amanda. It makes a great jumping off point for starting conversations at home.
AMANDA: I think it would be an interesting experiment to take two people that had very strong ideas about gender roles and then ask them to sit down and have a conversation and try to see themselves as not having a gender. And see what happened like, you know a woman might want to stay home with the kids and be a stay at home mom and cook and clean and that might make her really happy and that's totally fine but does she want but because she wants that or does she want that because she thinks that that's what she's supposed to want in the tables flipped too for men and you know he's a very but he could just sit down and say this is who I want to be and this is what I want out of out of my life and my time and how I want to participate in our family in our relationship regardless of what's in your pants.
I think it would be a really interesting experiment I've never been in that situation but
I think that lots of people bring expectations and history with them about what they've been what they've seen what they've grown up with what their friends are like and what kind of roles are playing out around them.
And if you just strip all that away and take those two people and say - What do you really want? Like what do you want your life to be like? And what do you want to be shaped like? And how do you want to be a parent? And how do you want to be a partner? And how do you want to be all these things that you're going to be in your life? Would be a really cool thing to find out how that worked.
CLEVELAND: Thanks for listening to Thread the Needle, a monthly podcast that explores the meeting place between feminist ideals and the realities of women’s lives. I’m Donna Cleveland, the host and producer of this show. The theme song is by Meara Oberdieck, original music is by Taylor Ross, and episode artwork is by Chosie Titus. Thank you to Molly Bloom of American Public Media for being my mentor.
If you have feedback or a story you’d like to see featured in a future episode, please email me at podcast@theneedle.co.
Also, if you feel to, please leave a review of Thread the Needle and share it with your friends. This is an independent podcast and a passion project, and I’m relying primarily on word of mouth to spread the word about the show. Leaving a review, sharing it on social media, or telling your group of friends all makes a huge difference. Thanks and I’ll be back next month with another episode for you.