How Gender Researchers Divide Chores at Home
In their personal lives, sociologists attempt to ward off the same inequalities that they study at work.
Over the years, as I’ve interviewed many sociologists about gender divisions in how couples handle chores and child care, I’ve often wondered what happened after we got off the phone. When these researchers returned to their life, how were they splitting up the tasks in their own home? Because gender scholars—they’re just like us: They too have floors to sweep, kids to feed, toilets to clean.
But, I learned, they are also decidedly not like us. In different-sex couples who have young children and both work a full-time job, mothers are estimated to do an average of more hours a week of paid and unpaid labor than fathers. Yet most of the sociologists I recently spoke with reported an equitable division of labor at home. These researchers’
