Share the Chores and Stay Happy

Families in the developed world have changed the ways in which they earn a living and look after themselves.  More men (the traditional wage-earners) find they are helping out more at home with the chores, as their wives take jobs and become equal-share wage earners.  One way of comparing these roles has been to count the number of hours spent by the partners doing unpaid and paid work.  This is the approach taken by a research team from the University of Western Ontario, Canada; their report is online.

Data were taken from Statistics Canada surveys done in 1986, 1992, 1998, and 2005.  As expected, a ‘shared roles’ category, where each partner’s unpaid work is within 40% to 60% of the total unpaid work, has increased over the almost 20 years covered by the surveys; by 2005 this category represented 25% of respondents.  (In other words, by 2005 men in this group were doing 40-60% of the household chores.)  The ‘complementary-traditional’ category – men doing more paid work and women doing more unpaid work (chores) – is shrinking, but was still, at about 30%, the largest group in 2005.

Questionnaire scores for items of ‘happiness’, ‘life satisfaction’, and ‘stress’ were compared for these two categories.  The shared-roles category had the highest average scores for happiness and life satisfaction for both sexes; however, this category was also found to score high for stress in men, but not in women.

The situation has changed, a lot, since 2005.  And things in the USA may be different from those in Canada, somewhat.  But I believe the study findings have validity.  When both partners share the unpaid as well as the paid hours, there will be more contentment.  Only when one partner (usually the woman) is expected to shoulder longer paid and unpaid hours, in total, will there be an impossible element of unfairness and, therefore, unhappiness.