9 ms·

This is true, to some extent, and false to some extent as well. There are plenty of fathers who split primary care giving. Also, once children reach school

This is true, to some extent, and false to some extent as well. There are plenty of fathers who split primary care giving. Also, once children reach school age, primary care giving responsibilities decrease and can be split between parents more easily.

DoreenMichele 9y ago
The stats I have seen suggest that full time moms do 60 hours of women's work per week. Working moms still do 40. To make up for the loss of 20 hours of women's work, men began doing an extra 10 minutes per day, or 1 hour and 10 minutes per week. Those stats are not current. Given the reactions I got from working women at a Fortune 500 company over the detail that my sons took over the cooking and cleaning, I have zero reason to believe we are anywhere near achieving parity.
- computerex 9y ago
  Where are you getting these numbers?
  - DoreenMichele 9y ago
    Lots and lots and lots of reading over the years.
    - anonemouse145 9y ago
      "Lots and lots of reading", yes that scholarly peer reviewed journal. I know it well.
      - DoreenMichele 9y ago
        The 60 hours of work a week for homemakers comes from a book called "More work for mother." It is a figure that has been stable for 300 years. I don't recall where specifically I got some of the other figures. I was trying to sort my life out, not prepare for debate on an internet forum I had not yet heard of and which did not exist when I was doing a lot of this reading in my 20s.
        computerex 9y ago
        I don't think the statistics you posted about men working an extra 10 mins a day is accurate. It actually sounds quite absurd.
      - dang 9y ago
        You've posted plenty of comments that break the HN guidelines. If you keep doing this will ban you. Especially, please cut the ideological flamebait and—as in this case—nasty snark. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- logfromblammo 9y ago
  So... 18.83 hours of that work are unnecessary, and were never demanded by any other person in the household? Isn't that a bit like squeegee men demanding payment for impromptu windshield cleanings that nobody ever asked for? At various times, different members of our household have been responsible for the domestic tasks, as the other one exported labor and imported money. I'm not saying which of us is male or female, or even implying that there's one of each. You can assume, if you like. My spouse takes a vastly different approach to meal preparation than I do. I will make one meal for everyone, using a fixed menu that I decide. Everyone else can eat it, or not. The spouse is more of a restaurant cook, taking orders and fulfilling requests. In my opinion, that's really a colossal waste of time and resources, and probably spoiling our kids, but I'm not the one doing it, so that's fine. Similar with other aspects of housework. When I clean a toilet, I use bleach, a sponge or paper towel, and a brush, and it takes me about five minutes. When my spouse does it, there is some kind of ritual for evoking the cleaning daemons, with nitrile gloves and 12 different chemicals and it apparently takes all f'in' day. When I do laundry, I separate bleachables from colors, and separate colors by dye type if that load needs splitting. I make the machines do most of the work, then put the clean clothes into the correct closet after they finish. When my spouse does it, again, there is some sort of lengthy ritual with blood sacrifice involved, leaving the laundromancer too exhausted afterward to actually put the clean clothes away. I get it. When I'm at a real, paying job, I sometimes pad out simple tasks to make them look more complicated, just so I won't get allocated extra work just because I have the capacity. But my spouse will even make a big deal about pushing the "clean" button on the Roomba automated floor-cleaning robot. Now, when the household cleaning duties are shared, it is no longer necessary to invent stupid, complicated chores that don't actually need to be done, on whatever aggressive schedule was there before to make yourself look busy. There is no reason to demand an equal division of housework when so much of it is unnecessary bullshit. If all that petty crap really needs doing, we are both perfectly capable of buying, building, or modding a tool that can evaporate away most of the effort behind it, instead of turning it into some kind of broomhandle-measuring contest to prove who does more around the house. My spouse can continue believing in the labor theory of value, and I can continue believing in the market clearing theory of value, and then I can still get yelled at for all those things I don't do because I never agreed that they needed doing, and never agreed that there is any relative advantage in having one particular person do them instead of the other. I can guess how those working women reacted. They probably assumed the sons were doing an inadequate, slipshod job. And they might be. But you aren't really saving yourself work if you have to micromanage them, so you have to let them half-ass it if you really want to save yourself the effort. It does you no good whatsoever to wind yourself up to make other people do their job the "right" way, because then you might as well just do it yourself, the way you want it done.

DoreenMichele 9y ago

The stats I have seen suggest that full time moms do 60 hours of women's work per week. Working moms still do 40. To make up for the loss of 20 hours of women's work, men began doing an extra 10 minutes per day, or 1 hour and 10 minutes per week. Those stats are not current. Given the reactions I got from working women at a Fortune 500 company over the detail that my sons took over the cooking and cleaning, I have zero reason to believe we are anywhere near achieving parity.

computerex 9y ago
Where are you getting these numbers?
- DoreenMichele 9y ago
  Lots and lots and lots of reading over the years.
  - anonemouse145 9y ago
    "Lots and lots of reading", yes that scholarly peer reviewed journal. I know it well.
    - DoreenMichele 9y ago
      The 60 hours of work a week for homemakers comes from a book called "More work for mother." It is a figure that has been stable for 300 years. I don't recall where specifically I got some of the other figures. I was trying to sort my life out, not prepare for debate on an internet forum I had not yet heard of and which did not exist when I was doing a lot of this reading in my 20s.
      - computerex 9y ago
        I don't think the statistics you posted about men working an extra 10 mins a day is accurate. It actually sounds quite absurd.
    - dang 9y ago
      You've posted plenty of comments that break the HN guidelines. If you keep doing this will ban you. Especially, please cut the ideological flamebait and—as in this case—nasty snark. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
logfromblammo 9y ago
So... 18.83 hours of that work are unnecessary, and were never demanded by any other person in the household? Isn't that a bit like squeegee men demanding payment for impromptu windshield cleanings that nobody ever asked for? At various times, different members of our household have been responsible for the domestic tasks, as the other one exported labor and imported money. I'm not saying which of us is male or female, or even implying that there's one of each. You can assume, if you like. My spouse takes a vastly different approach to meal preparation than I do. I will make one meal for everyone, using a fixed menu that I decide. Everyone else can eat it, or not. The spouse is more of a restaurant cook, taking orders and fulfilling requests. In my opinion, that's really a colossal waste of time and resources, and probably spoiling our kids, but I'm not the one doing it, so that's fine. Similar with other aspects of housework. When I clean a toilet, I use bleach, a sponge or paper towel, and a brush, and it takes me about five minutes. When my spouse does it, there is some kind of ritual for evoking the cleaning daemons, with nitrile gloves and 12 different chemicals and it apparently takes all f'in' day. When I do laundry, I separate bleachables from colors, and separate colors by dye type if that load needs splitting. I make the machines do most of the work, then put the clean clothes into the correct closet after they finish. When my spouse does it, again, there is some sort of lengthy ritual with blood sacrifice involved, leaving the laundromancer too exhausted afterward to actually put the clean clothes away. I get it. When I'm at a real, paying job, I sometimes pad out simple tasks to make them look more complicated, just so I won't get allocated extra work just because I have the capacity. But my spouse will even make a big deal about pushing the "clean" button on the Roomba automated floor-cleaning robot. Now, when the household cleaning duties are shared, it is no longer necessary to invent stupid, complicated chores that don't actually need to be done, on whatever aggressive schedule was there before to make yourself look busy. There is no reason to demand an equal division of housework when so much of it is unnecessary bullshit. If all that petty crap really needs doing, we are both perfectly capable of buying, building, or modding a tool that can evaporate away most of the effort behind it, instead of turning it into some kind of broomhandle-measuring contest to prove who does more around the house. My spouse can continue believing in the labor theory of value, and I can continue believing in the market clearing theory of value, and then I can still get yelled at for all those things I don't do because I never agreed that they needed doing, and never agreed that there is any relative advantage in having one particular person do them instead of the other. I can guess how those working women reacted. They probably assumed the sons were doing an inadequate, slipshod job. And they might be. But you aren't really saving yourself work if you have to micromanage them, so you have to let them half-ass it if you really want to save yourself the effort. It does you no good whatsoever to wind yourself up to make other people do their job the "right" way, because then you might as well just do it yourself, the way you want it done.