Housework: Should men do more?

“Cleaning is still very much women’s work,” said Jessica Grose in The New Republic, and it’s not fair. Men are starting to do their share of cooking and child care, especially when both parents work full-time. But when it comes to cleaning, most of them are like my husband, “who’s never scrubbed a toilet in the six years we’ve lived together.” Some 55 percent of working mothers do housework on an average day, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, compared with 18 percent of employed fathers. “Why has cleaning remained the final frontier?” Maybe it’s the responsibility that women have been conditioned to feel for the state of their homes, and the fact that they’re judged for it. But cleaning obviously isn’t as fun as the housework that modern man has made his own, like cooking an elaborate meal or reading your kid a bedtime story. “With all these obstacles to real gender parity of chores, what’s a working woman to do?”

“Try living like men,” said Jonathan Chait in NYMag.com. It’s a simple fact of life that women generally have “higher standards of cleanliness” than men do. Women see filth and grime where we men don’t, and when we do see it, we tend to care about it less. But who’s to say that “the correct level of cleanliness” should be determined by the female alone? In a relationship where two people disagree on what constitutes a clean home, one person is bound to spend more time cleaning than the other. The only way to correct that imbalance is to “converge on each other’s level of tidiness.” So relax. “Put down the duster. It’ll be okay.”

Patronizing us is no answer, said Alexandra Bradner in The Atlantic. Ever since mothers started working outside the home, we’ve “picked up the slack for both partners.” That’s got to end. It’s stressful enough to juggle the demands of your children and your employer without the pressures of being a maid, too. My suggestion is to split housework duties down the middle. Women, draw up a list of “invisible tasks”—the kind of routine cleaning chores that men like Chait “simply do not see”—and then divide it. Men, agree to do your share—“not because you’re obligated to rectify an injustice, but because you can.” And if the man in your life won’t even consider sharing the burden of keeping house, said Tracy Moore in Jezebel.com, you have “bigger issues to solve than a dirty kitchen floor.”

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