I'm reading an article about the gap between the amount of housework and childcare a wife does vs. her husband in a household where both individuals work outside the home. The size of the gap isn't what caught my eye and caused me to write about it--we all know men do less than women in these studies, since that's the point of the study. What caught my eye was the following:
In couples in which both husband and wife have full-time paying jobs, the wife does 28 hours of housework per week and the husband, 16. In these same couples, the mom does 11 hours per week of childcare while the dad does three hours.
That means in two-parent, two-income households, women are spending twice as much time on housework vs. "childcare". Men are spending three times more on housework than childcare. There seems something very wrong with that. The ratios are off. If you are both working outside the home, wouldn't spending time with your child when you are home be more important than vacuuming or weed pulling?
I don't know how these statistics are gathered, but it seems a bit off. I don't know any men with little ones who spend only three hours a week caring for their children. And thank god for that.
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