The only thing more tedious than doing housework is reading about
housework. Yet with the gritty determination of a committed
obsessive-compulsive, I plowed through an 8,000-word New York Times
Magazine expose on the current state of gender equity in the American
home: “When Mom and Dad Share It All.”
Apparently, men and women are still not equal partners. In fact,
they’re so unequal that they’re more or less stuck in the same trends
of 90 years ago, despite our best efforts to get men to be better women
and women to be better men.
Alas, still foiled.
The most recent figures from the University of Wisconsin’s National
Survey of Families and Households indicate that the average wife does
31 hours of housework a week compared to the average husband’s 14. When
wives stay home, they do 38 hours of housework a week compared to men’s
12.
Child care is even more lopsided.
Apparently, these ratios hold true across most demographics, regardless
of whether couples are white-collar or blue-collar, upper class or
middle class.
Writer Lisa Belkin does yeoman’s work in trying to pierce the mystery
of why these divisions of labor haven’t changed with the times. She
interviewed social scientists and earnest couples who are charting new
territory with graphs and lists — enough to furnish a multitasker’s
most exotic dreamscape.
But little truck is given to the obvious: Men and women are hard-wired
differently. Of course, that sort of statement will get you run off of
college campuses these days — ask Lawrence Summers — but common sense
and experience often explain what science cannot.
Gender theorists who insist that only socialization is to blame for the
unequal divisions of labor tend to search for any explanation other
than simply that men and women may have different preferences.
One whom Belkin quotes points to cultural “messages” to explain the
gap. When people see a pregnant woman and her husband, for instance,
“How many people have asked her if she is going to go back to work
after the baby? How many have asked him?”
Ah yes, now it’s perfectly clear. We’re supposed to deduce from this
implied gender bias that men would stay home more often with their
newborns if only society got it that men have babies, too.
Except they don’t. Women do. It should go without saying that a mother,
having just given birth — which is somewhat more taxing than counting
contractions with a stopwatch — might be more likely to stay home with
the little critter for a few weeks, though preferably much longer.
The same scientist blames social pressures for the perception among
many men and women that the sexes simply have different housekeeping
and parenting standards, as couples often concede after living together
for about 10 minutes.
To what end these labored studies?
Trying to figure out how to balance careers and family is a daunting
endeavor. Couples are indeed hassled by modern stresses and those
working outside the home have to be part magician to keep all the
moveable parts in place. But somehow couples do work these things out
without the aid of manifestos and PowerPoint presentations.
Or so one would think.
Gender theorists, meanwhile, may be saddled with a doomed task, trying
to fit the square peg of reality into the round hole of hope. Sometimes
things just are what they are. And wishful theory is no match for
nature’s stubborn ambition.
At the University of Virginia, Steven E. Rhoads — author of “Taking Sex
Differences Seriously” — led a study of 184 tenure-track academic
couples and found that even the most presumably enlightened people
within our culture fall into the same patterns because, well, they just
do. Women — including university professors — “simply like child care
more than men and are reluctant to cede many child care duties to their
husbands,” concluded the study’s authors.
Harvard zoologist E.O. Wilson wrote in his book “In Search of Nature”
that “what is” in human nature — and what may explain our rut of
domestic inequity — probably goes back to our Pleistocene
hunter-gatherer forebears.
None of which means we can’t change, but it might take some time.
Genetic bias isn’t as malleable as gender bias and is intense enough,
writes Wilson, “to cause a substantial division of labor even in the
most free and most egalitarian of future societies.”
In the meantime, couples might toss their calculators and flowcharts and enjoy the ride. It’s short — and, on good days, messy.
Kathleen Parker’s e-mail address is kparker@kparker.com.
