Historically, married women in the United States have done the lion’s share of their households’ laundry, cooking and cleaning. But that gendered norm appears to be shifting, with the gap between the time married women and men spent on such chores shrinking by 40 percent over the last two decades, researchers report February 6 in Socius.

By the numbers, from 2003 to 2005, married women spent, on average, 4.2 hours per week on traditionally feminine tasks, such as meal prep and tidying up, for every 1 hour married men spent on those same tasks, according to the American Time Use Survey, a nationally representative survey that shows how, where and with whom Americans spend their time. By the 2022 to 2023 survey, the gender gap had shrunk to married women spending 2.5 hours on those sorts of chores for every 1 hour by married men.

“Men are doing quote, unquote ‘women’s work,’” says Melissa Milkie, a sociologist at the University of Toronto. “There is a hopeful story here.”

Milkie’s findings add to a longstanding debate among gender scholars over whether or not the gender revolution — marked by increasing parity between men’s and women’s employment and division of household tasks — has stalled over the past two decades. That is, in the 1960s married women did seven times more housework than their husbands. By the mid-1990s, those numbers had plummeted, with married women doing roughly twice as much housework than their husbands.

Since then, progress has dropped off. In 2003, for instance, women devoted 18.5 hours per week, on average, to all housework — including traditionally feminine tasks, such as cleaning, cooking and laundry, as well as childcare, shopping, outdoor chores and gardening — compared with married men’s 10.1 hours per week. Twenty years later, women were spending 17.7 hours on such tasks compared with married men’s 11.2 hours per week: Even in the 2020s, married women still do roughly 1.6 times more housework than married men.

But looking at hours spent on all forms of housework in aggregate masks real progress, Milkie argues. Besides a shrinking gap in time spent on traditionally feminine chores, the hours married men and women spend shopping for groceries and other household needs is nearing parity. The gender gap in childcare hours remains large, with married women spending almost twice as many hours caring for their children than married men. But the persistence of that gap is partially explained by the fact that both married men and women have increased the time they spend with their children since 2003.

A limitation of the study is that it cannot tease out the time single parents spend on such tasks or account for time spent on other caregiving responsibilities, such as elder care, that typically fall to women, the team notes. 

Moreover, demographic shifts over the past two decades can explain the decreasing amount of time women devote to household tasks, the team found. For example, younger, college-educated married women are doing less housework than older, less educated married women. Yet similar demographic shifts cannot explain why men are spending more time on housework. Instead, the researchers suspect that shifting beliefs around what constitutes women’s work might underpin men’s change in behavior.

Trends that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic are telling, Milkie says. While everyone significantly increased time spent on chores and childcare in 2020, by 2023, the hours women spent on such tasks had largely returned to the pre-pandemic baseline. But men have remained more equal contributors. In other words, Milkie says, men developed new household habits and, to some extent, those habits have persisted.

It’s easy to look at the small drop in women’s overall housework between 2003 and 2023 and lament the glacial pace of change, says sociologist and demographer Mila Kolpashnikova of The University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, who was not involved with this work. But breaking down chore types to look at those deemed feminine shows that meaningful cultural shifts may be afoot. “You can look at [these changes] as a glass-half-empty type of change. But you can also look at it as a glass-half-full type of change, as this paper shows,” she says.