Are women naturally better at housework than men?

Back to the gender slop factory

I got triggered this week by a Substack post about housework, so I’m clocking in again at the gender slop factory. I was informed a few months ago that my IQ was too low to debate hereditarianism (try me, people!) and that midwit females like me should stick to writing about “sex and relationships” instead. Every time I write about relationships, I thank that guy for helping me reach my true potential. After all, we take workplace dynamics so seriously that there are whole business school departments devoted to studying them. Yet we treat domestic work like a fluffy topic, of interest only to cranky housewives and burned-out divorcees. The lack of seriousness with which we approach housework as a legitimate topic is a perfect reflection of the sexism that leads us to undervalue it! So back to the gender mines we go.

The “gender revolution” of the last century is incomplete: despite tremendous advancement within the paid workforce, women’s incursions into employment outside the home have not been matched by men’s contributions within the home.* We’ve normalized the idea that a woman can outearn her male partner, without embracing the notion that men can rule the home front as stay-at-home dads and homemakers. We’re (relatively) comfortable with women coding computers, balancing budgets, running meetings, and building widgets. We’re less comfortable when men take on the lion’s share of parenting, housekeeping, and home management. (When I say “we” I’m speaking of the royal “we,” or maybe just the “we” encapsulated by Substack commenters who come out of the woodwork whenever I write anything about feminism or housework). This is surprising, if you think about the fact that having women in boardrooms and factories, earning income, represents a greater shake-up for global power dynamics than whatever couples privately decide about how they want to manage their homes. Wouldn’t a working woman, making trouble on the public stage, be a greater threat to the social order than a housekeeping man?

Apparently not, because housekeeping men threaten our notions of masculinity in ways that are more destabilizing than girlboss women. (I’m not saying that girlboss women aren’t threatening, by the way. They’re plenty scary to many dudes. But based on many people’s apparent visceral reactions to the stay-at-home dad idea, there’s an ick factor attached to a man-of-the-house that isn’t as strong as the ick attached to a salaried lady). These days, I rarely hear people make the argument that women simply don’t have the skills or motivation necessary to work outside the home. (I’m sure they’re making them somewhere, in some particularly mucilaginous corner of X). But I often hear the complementary suggestion. Women end up doing more domestic work even within dual-earner couples, not because of gender role socialization or any malingering on men’s part, because Women are naturally better at housework than men.

This statement is more insidious than its opposite, “Men are naturally better at performing salaried work,” because it’s couched as what sounds like praise for women, but it does essentially the same job of reifying a social norm as inevitable and intractable.

If we want to pressure-test this statement, we need to break it down and operationalize the components.

Before I get into pressure-testing, let me lay out some priors. First, I’m pro-marriage, in the sense that I think marriage is generally good for individuals, children, and social stability. One reason I care about domestic workload is because it becomes a nexus for conflict in many couples and leads to dissolution of relationships that might otherwise survive. In the United States, divorce is initiated by women about 70% of the time, and disputes over the division of household labor are frequently cited as a key reason. Inequitable housework arrangements may even suppress the birth rate! I’m pro-men, in the sense that I like them, personally, and also think they are highly skilled, competent, and generally well-intentioned individuals. I’m not a biological determinist, but unlike some hardcore gender socialization folks, I do believe in the existence of real biological differences between men and women (with caveats, as I’ll explain). I’m on board with evolutionary theories of human development. So, to preemptively defuse at least a few of the comments I’ll get on this piece, I’m not starting from a “men are the worst, all marriages should end, and all gender differences are made up” perspective.

OK, back to pressure-testing. Let’s take the title of this article. What is “naturally,” what is “better,” and what is “housework”?

Let’s decide that “naturally” means whatever we talk about when we talk about “biology” or “innate wiring.” Our genetic encoding, our brain structure, our hormonal milieu, our in-born traits. Of course, humans demonstrate adaptation and plasticity in all of the above. I could write a whole essay about how stress exerts epigenetic effects, how the brain changes when we acquire new skills or enter into parenthood, or how hormone levels in biparental animals change across a breeding season, but for the purposes of this argument, I’ll skip ahead and assume that we mean “biologically determined and not the product of culture or socialization.” When we use words like “naturally,” we’re implying that said differences are not amenable to intervention, and efforts to change them will be fruitless.

What does “better” mean? Presumably, it means that women will do a more competent job with most housekeeping tasks, but is that because women are more skilled, or more motivated? This is not just a semantic question; it matters for our argument. Women might have advantages in some traits that are helpful for housework (they tend to be more verbal and have better fine motor skills), but many of these traits don’t translate towards household tasks like pushing a vacuum cleaner or driving a kid to sports practice. When one points this out, the argument usually morphs into the contention that women are more motivated to do housework. “Motivation” includes a few dimensions: being more likely to notice disorder; having a lower disgust threshold; being more attuned to the needs of other family members; enjoying housework tasks more; or having more perfectionistic standards for the upkeep of the home.

We’ll circle back to these, but first, what does “housework” mean? When people make evolutionary arguments about the gendered division of particular tasks, they often fail to acknowledge that the tasks themselves have also evolved. In much the same way that our workplaces are now more likely to feature a computer on a desk than a net, a spear, or a boar, our homes are full of labor-saving devices – dishwashers, washing machines – that have turned grueling, hours-long jobs into a series of button-pushes.

If we want to support the “naturally” part of our claim, we will need to show that the division of household labor is highly conserved across cultures and across historical time, such that women have always taken charge of domestic tasks. But that requires some specificity. How would we operationalize housework in a hunter-gatherer context, the type of society in which humans spent 95% of their evolutionary history? Here are some typical “housework” tasks in these societies:

-Hauling water
-Tending the fire
-Butchering meat
-Grinding and soaking wild plants
-Maintaining the camp site (repairing structures, sweeping away debris)
-Pest management
- Scraping hides, tanning leather, sewing or patching garments
-Sharpening stone tools, repairing nets, baskets, or containers
-Tending to young children
-Instructing children
-Preparing for rituals (body painting, creating ornaments)
-Storytelling and passing along oral traditions

It's pretty clear from this list that many of the tasks are, in fact, the domain of women: tending to young children, hauling water, dealing with plants, and weaving are tasks that have been held by women across many societies, although often performed by groups rather within individual households. However, many tasks are also held by men or split by women and men: butchering and roasting meat, tanning leather, sharpening and repairing tools and nets, maintaining the camp. Is grinding a plant “housework” but cutting up meat “not housework”? Is repairing a basket “housework” but repairing a net “not housework”? Is sewing hides “housework” but scraping hides “not housework”? Women do most of the early infant care, but childcare is not exclusive to women in many societies (take the Aka Pygmys, where men spend much of their days holding and tending to them; it’s been estimated that fathers of young children are within arm’s reach of those children about 50% of the time), and instructing children is also frequently part of the purview of men. Storytelling is frequently done by men, but also by women, and both women and men participate in preparing for rituals. We could develop some theories about why these tasks have gotten specialized in the way they have (and such theories exist!) but it’s easy enough to just extrapolate from obvious sex differences, like, “Men do jobs that require greater height, upper body strength, and risk tolerance” and “Women do jobs that involve fine motor precision and/or breastmilk.” However, all of these tasks fall under the domestic workload umbrella, because they all involve the upkeep of the home and family. (Contemporary men also do lots of male-typed tasks at home too that are adjacent to these, from grilling meat to repairing furniture, and we do count these tasks as housework in time-diary studies that estimate relative male and female contributions).

Maybe the hunter-gather society is too distal; perhaps it’s better to look at housework from the more familiar perspective of an agricultural society. Let’s take, for example, a historical period that we enjoy reenacting at the Renaissance Faire. What might we call “housework” in medieval Europe?

-Grinding grain
-Gathering firewood
-Boiling, baking and roasting food
-Dairy work (tending to cows and goats, milking, fermenting cheese)
-Preserving food (salting, smoking, drying meats and fish; brewing beer)
-Spinning and weaving
-Sewing and mending clothes
-Washing
-Caring for livestock, collecting eggs
-Slaughtering and butchering animals
-Bee-keeping
-Gardening and harvesting
-Latrine maintenance
-Soap-making, candle-making
-Blacksmithing/ tool repair
-Medicine, midwifery
-Storytelling and observing religious ritual

So which of these tasks were done by women? Quite a few, but men actually did most of the baking and brewing, most of the meat processing, all the blacksmithing, some of the medicine, much of the gardening and harvesting, firewood collection, religious ritual, livestock care, and shelter upkeep. There was a fine line between “home” and “craft,” and some of these activities shaded into commerce. Again, whatever theories you might develop to account for task specialization (women do vegetables, men do meat? women do cows, men do horses?), the simplest breakdown is still “Men do the jobs that require taller, stronger bodies.”

As is still true in many societies, class was a better predictor of housework participation than gender. Wealthy women did very few of the above tasks, and the wealthiest women even outsourced their infant care to wet nurses. Noblewomen were usually too busy managing their estates to parent their children directly, and it was common to send babies to the country for the first four years of their lives.

The importance of class to domestic work continued through the Industrial Revolution and to the present day. The “family butler,” a role almost always held by a man, managed household staff, served wine, polished silver, orchestrated meals, and tracked household supplies, all activities that certainly fall under the housework banner.

I have probably now beaten this point into a cudgel, but the key takeaway is that the tasks we classify as housework are dynamic and shaped by technology, class, and community resources. “Mending clothes” might be a woman’s job across many historical epochs, but nowadays when a garment needs to be patched, I outsource the job to the nearby dry cleaners. To accomplish the task, I must drive a car and exchange money, two activities that are considered unwomanly in some cultures.

Women entered the work world in the greatest numbers when we shifted from a manufacturing to a service and knowledge economy, and the specialization of men into tougher and riskier work no longer applied to many careers. The landscape of the home has also shifted in similar ways. Men are supposed to like gadgets, and the home is now full of machines! Does the specialization of women into housekeeping roles continue to serve our collective interest?

If we agree that it does not, we can arrive at a more adaptive divide: one that allows partners to figure out for themselves where their skills and interests lie, and what roles make sense given their other constraints and obligations. For many couples, that might look like a traditional division of labor, and that’s great! Other couples may wish to negotiate different arrangements. But assumptions about the “inevitability” of particular roles stalls progress in this domain.

Here’s a good example of essentialist logic from a comment on the post that initially focused my attention on this topic. I’m not sharing this to shame the commenter, because he seems to be well-intentioned and thoughtful, and he’s not alone in this stance:

“Women are outpacing men in the marketplace, yet men still seem to have minds less naturally oriented toward nurturing and home life….I can’t imagine a future where I walk into a room and see what my wife sees—clutter, disorganization, and all the subtle cues of a household in need of attention. I can’t picture myself ever naturally remembering birthdays, immunization schedules, or the names of my kids’ friends’ parents. I’m deeply grateful for my wife in this regard. The life of our family would collapse without her and it is an unequal burden, and I want to share more of the load, but the truth is she’s simply better at it than I am….Can we actually just do the work to socialize men to be better at this? Maybe to a point but again this feels more fundamental than that.”

This comment reflects a level of hopelessness – “minds less naturally oriented,” “I can’t imagine a future,” “she’s simply better at it,” “this feels more fundamental” – that strikes me as surprisingly passive given the level of agency that men are typically encouraged to show. If the commenter’s wife posted something similar about walking into an office to do her paid job – say, “I can’t imagine keeping track of all the budget spreadsheets, business competitor’s names, and meetings to attend” – we would exhort her to develop greater confidence in her own abilities. The assumption driving the comment is that the work the wife is doing – the noticing of disorganization, the remembering of birthdays – is not effortful or deliberately undertaken, but rather a fundamental extension of her identity. Therefore, it cannot be learned, socialized, or equitably shared. (The 19th century butler, who carried all the mental load of a complex household, might beg to differ).

Where does this seemingly entrenched belief system come from? Perhaps not from our understanding of evolution or the brain. I said I’d circle back to the “motivation” argument, so let’s unpack the dimensions, which entail noticing disorder more keenly and having a stronger desire to rectify it. It’s true that women are more sensitive to smells and more prone to disgust; the lower disgust threshold, which may be mediated by ovarian hormones, is likely an adaptation to protect women from pathogens during pregnancy. However, if disgust is the key driver of divisions of housework, it doesn’t explain why women often handle gross jobs like slaughtering chickens, curdling milk for cheese, emptying chamber pots, or mucking out livestock stalls. The whole “women notice disorder more” argument is comical to my husband, because most of our arguments about housekeeping revolve around my obliviousness to clutter. Because it’s frustrating to him when I leave my dishes unwashed in the sink or my clothes on the floor, I have effortfully trained myself to be more attentive to the kinds of messes that will bother him. This has taken many reminders and the building of new habits. In any case, there’s an empirical question here. Do single women do more housework than single men?

Here’s data from the American Time Use Survey. Single women do indeed do about 30 minutes more housework per day than single men, but that gap gets larger when couples cohabit, marry, and have children. A relatively small difference gets magnified with marriage.

So where does that leave us—are women better at housework? At times, yes, women show greater motivation to perform certain housework tasks than men, but gender socialization and culture clearly shape the performance of domestic workload.

Perhaps there’s a better, simpler explanation for gender disparities in the division of household labor that doesn’t require us to damn women with faint praise: Men don’t want to do housework. It’s boring, repetitive, low-status, and does not bring them success within a domain they consider valuable. Diana Fox Tilson, LICSW puts this more succinctly: “While women gain social capital by performing domestic labor, men lose it.” Housework is a female-coded activity in a culture that devalues femininity. Of course men want to steer clear of it! Women may not be naturally all that much more motivated to do housework, but men are definitely motivated to avoid it.

*This is well documented by time diary data, which finds that even when couples earn equivalent salaries, women do about five more hours a week of domestic work and men enjoy about three more hours of leisure. (Men do a few more hours of paid work a week in these couples, but the total paid + unpaid labor carried by women is still greater than that carried by men). Although those differences may sound minor, over the course of a year, women are devoting about six weeks worth of 40-hour workweeks to unpaid household work, and men are getting an extra month’s worth of 40-hour workweeks of leisure. Raw data show that married women do about 60-80% more of the total unpaid labor than married men, but you really need to adjust for income and work hours because men typically make more and work longer hours. After that adjustment, women are doing about 30-40% more of the unpaid household labor. The couples that get closest to a 50-50 division are actually female-breadwinner couples. In contrast, women do twice as much household labor when couples include a male breadwinner.

MUSIC RECOMMENDATION OF THE WEEK

This week, I want to talk about a mystery band; I fell in love with them and then they fell off the face of the earth. The band is called The Capitol Years, which I’m guessing is a Beatles reference. My husband and I saw them by accident in LA in 2006ish - we were going to a friend’s show, and they were opening up for a handful of people to very little fanfare. I have never been more surprised by the first minute of a band’s show. They played the song Mirage People, which I’m guessing is about a bad review they got from a critic. Here are the opening lines: “The Capitol Years are not a good band/ Unchain yourselves, gang/ I know the rock scene in Philly has reached a particular low.” Anyway, this recording is a little low-fi but it's probably from around the same time I saw them and gives you an idea. It’s exactly three minutes and perfect. The recorded version of this song is a little slower and less dynamic so you really need to hear the live version, especially because they nail the backing vocals.

Anyway, after that we immediately bought the record and started going around saying, “The Capitol Years are not a good band” to each other. The rest of the album is solid too. Here’s another track from it:

They toured a bunch and served as the backing band for Daniel Johnston.

But then they disappeared! Every couple of years I get curious and google the lead singer, Shai Halperin, but it seems like he has not released any new music since 2012ish. We have one Facebook friend in common, Substack subscriber Dan Silk, so maybe Dan is reading this and knows more than I do.