Huh?

Ow!

Wow!

I feel like I just stepped into the Schoolhouse Rock segment on interjections.

They show emotion. And excitement.

Here's the article. It's quite long but interesting enough.

But this:

Social scientists know in remarkable detail what goes on in the average American home. And they have calculated with great precision how little has changed in the roles of men and women. Any way you measure it, they say, women do about twice as much around the house as men.

The most recent figures from the University of Wisconsin’s National Survey of Families and Households show that the average wife does 31 hours of housework a week while the average husband does 14 — a ratio of slightly more than two to one. If you break out couples in which wives stay home and husbands are the sole earners, the number of hours goes up for women, to 38 hours of housework a week, and down a bit for men, to 12, a ratio of more than three to one. That makes sense, because the couple have defined home as one partner’s work.

But then break out the couples in which both husband and wife have full-time paying jobs. There, the wife does 28 hours of housework and the husband, 16. Just shy of two to one, which makes no sense at all.

The lopsided ratio holds true however you construct and deconstruct a family. “Working class, middle class, upper class, it stays at two to one,” says Sampson Lee Blair, an associate professor of sociology at the University at Buffalo who studies the division of labor in families.

“And the most sadly comic data is from my own research,” he adds, which show that in married couples “where she has a job and he doesn’t, and where you would anticipate a complete reversal, even then you find the wife doing the majority of the housework.”

Housework, in this context, is defined as things like cooking, cleaning, yardwork and home repairs. Child care is a whole separate category — one that is even more skewed. The social scientist’s definition of child care “is attending to the physical needs of a child — dressing a child, cooking for a child, feeding and cleaning them,” Blair says. It doesn’t include the fun stuff, like playing and reading and kissing good night.

Where the housework ratio is two to one, the wife-to-husband ratio for child care in the United States is close to five to one. As with housework, that ratio does not change as much as you would expect when you account for who brings home a paycheck. In a family where Mom stays home and Dad goes to work, she spends 15 hours a week caring for children and he spends 2. In families in which both parents are wage earners, Mom’s average drops to 11 and Dad’s goes up to 3. Lest you think this is at least a significant improvement over our parents and grandparents, not so fast. “The most striking part,” Blair says, “is that none of this is all that different, in terms of ratio, from 90 years ago.”

It's all whoa. K and I have a somewhat equitable breakdown that is mostly dependent on who has time off when. Things get tense around times when we both work full time.

Right now, she's doing the lionshare of the work. And that will change soon enough. But to see those ratios is depressing.

In the department of "please, God, don't let this happen; politics have been crazy enough so far this century," speculation on an electoral college tie:

[link]

Also, I want to go on record, msbelle and any other single mom out there. I am in awe of you. I have a hard enough time with a full time coparent and a ton of help in the form of Lori and a great day care provider. I cannot conceive of how I could do this alone.

I think you are brave and amazing.

It doesn’t include the fun stuff, like playing and reading and kissing good night.

While I get the point, WTF? Maybe thinking this is somehow not part of child care is part of the problem.

aurelia - how about Artist's Cafe, say 5 o'clock? I can skate out of work a little early. (Unless you have a better suggestion - I've never been, but it looks like they have outdoor seating which might be nice today.)

Do men do more hours of housework when they live by themselves? Or, like, do they just live in grosser homes?

t insert my rant about gay marriage benefiting straight couples here

Do men do more hours of housework when they live by themselves? Or, like, do they just live in grosser homes?

The latter (for me, anyway).