Business

Women Spend Nearly an Hour More Per Day on Chores Than Men

The only things men do more of are repairs and mowing the lawn.

By Olga Khazan

The most wonderful thing about the American Time Use Survey, other than its ability to fuel endless navel-gazing charts to browse on your lunch break, is that it confirms certain things that you just knew to be true, but never quite had the evidence for.

Thus, a woman may be tempted to print out the following chart and slap it on the dining room table for their partner/husband/boyfriend/fiance/platonic male roommate to behold with his sad, wrong eyes:

Average Number of Minutes Spent on Household Activities

Average number of minutes per day, according to 2013 BLS data. (Olga Khazan)

"See," she might say, giddy with self-satisfaction.

Women do more chores than men by 51 minutes per day, according to the 2013 Time Use Survey numbers. That's almost an entire Game of Thrones episode.

"On an average day, women spent more than twice as much time preparing food and drink, almost three times as much time doing interior cleaning, and four times as much time doing laundry as did men," the BLS wrote last year, when the data looked tragically similar.

The only thing men did more of than women was mowing the lawn and fixing things. They also spent four minutes more on cars and a minute more on appliances.

The chore gap would perhaps not be such a big deal if women didn't also spend nearly twice as much time taking care of children and other members of the household.

Olga Khazan is a staff writer at The Atlantic. She is the author of Weird: The Power of Being an Outsider in an Insider World. She has also written for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and other publications. She writes a Substack on personality change.