Men Are Getting Better But Still a Long Way Behind
- 18 minutes ago
- 2 min read
A new study on how Americans spend their time at home reveals a distinct gap in terms of who is doing what as regards housework.
Between the dishes, hoovering, dusting, yard work, laundry etc. etc., the work required to keep a home running isn’t equally shared; though the good news is that men are getting better at putting in the time. New data from the Pew Research Center takes a closer look at how those hours break down, tracking how much time men and women spend on housework each day. And no, it doesn’t all come out in the wash.
Researchers at Pew analyzed data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), a long-running dataset from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics that tracks how Americans spend their time over a 24-hour period. Participants log everything from paid work to child care to chores, creating one of the most detailed portraits of daily routines available. While the data is self-reported, it’s widely considered a gold standard for time-use research because it captures behavior in real time rather than relying on memory or perception.
Pew averaged data from the three most recent ATUS surveys (2022, 2023 and 2024). And, cutting straight to the chase, women are still do more - and by a meaningful margin. On average, women spend 2 hours 19 minutes per day doing housework, while men spend 1 hour and 34 minutes, according to Pew. Long-term research shows the ratio of women’s to men’s housework has gone from roughly 1.8-to-1 in the early 2000s to about 1.6-to-1 today, so it remains persistent.
However, the gap between the hours put in between men and women in their twenties has the lowest disparity across life's various decades. This must bode well for the gap to continue to narrow.