In defense of husbands

The great housework convergence is here

Come see me: I’ll be at the Los Angeles Festival of Books this weekend, hobnobbing with authors and speaking on a panel about parenting, and am doing an Interintellect Salon at the end of May. There are a limited number of free tickets available for paid subscribers to this newsletter, and you can get a paid subscription by pre-ordering my book. DM me if you’d like a ticket code.
ICYMI: I talked to Fortesa Latifi for a Yahoo News piece on the not-at-all controversial topic of sleep training, and to NPR Life Kit about working parenthood. Speaking of press, if you are a famous journalist or a massively popular Substacker and want to feature my book, hit me up for a galley!

If you get too deep into gender wars discourse, you’ll come away with a bad case of heteropessimism. If you’re on the left, you might conclude that malingering husbands are draining women of their life force, Dark Crystal style, by dumping the mental load of the universe on their wives. If you’re on the right, you are convinced that a fictitious bogeyman, the “girlboss,” is undermining women’s “natural” hankering to stay home and tend to a barn full of children. But neither perspective is quite right, and they’re both wrong in a similar way: They ignore a quiet revolution in the roles of husbands within the last half-century. If you look at the data on how men’s and women’s time use has changed within contemporary marriages, you might emerge with a surprising degree of hetero- optimism.

A confession: Although I often write about household labor, I myself am a terrible housekeeper. When my husband and I first started dating, I was living with six roommates in a hand-built, shockingly unsafe loft in the early-aughts hipster Busytown of Williamsburg, Brooklyn.¹ The loft had no reliable heat, just a giant oil drum on wheels that lived in a closet in the front of the apartment. When it ran out of oil, you’d wheel the drum out and manually refill it using a hose, then wheel it back into place and plug it into the heater.²

We were all idiots in our early twenties, but we had one roommate, Jerry, who was an actual adult. (In retrospect he was probably 30). He was an artist who had lived in the loft longer than anyone else. He hated all of us, of course. We had developed a collective standoff around doing the dishes. Everyone left just one coffee cup or just one plate in the big industrial sink; I was one of the worst offenders in the “I’ll rinse this later” camp. Over time, the sink accumulated a pile of unwashed dishes that became fuzzy with mold and too gross for anyone to tackle. Jerry’s solution was brilliant. Every couple of weeks, he’d grab a trash bag, fill it with every dish in the sink, and then hurl the trash bag out the window where it would land with a satisfyingly dish-shattering noise on the curb, three stories below. Didn’t matter if you had a favorite cup or your grandmother’s plate or whatever. Your dishes were gone. As a result, there were very few dishes left in the apartment by the time I moved out.

I’ve gotten better at housework since then, but my ADHDiness means that I’ll get halfway through drying the blender or making the bed and suddenly have a really good idea that requires a lengthy internet search, meaning that my house is full of blenders with dishtowels still in them and beds that have tucked-in sheets and blankets still on the floor.

My husband has, thankfully, made his peace with my distractibility. When I leave dishes in the sink, he doesn’t throw them out the window; he rolls his eyes and rinses them. He’s not the only husband who picks up the slack around the house. As long-time readers of Natal Gazing know, I am usually in the pro-husband camp. This puts me at odds with several corners of Substack.

An essay that recently went viral on this platform, with nearly 500 restacks, listed a slew of negative consequences for women married to men, including earlier mortality than single women, lower sexual satisfaction, and worse mental health. The article wrapped up this list by claiming “Single women are the happiest and healthiest subgroup compared to married women, single men and married men.” I’ve since seen this argument that marriage “hurts” women repeated on both Substack and Instagram. The problem with that claim is that it is simply not true. It’s one of the best-replicated, most widely acknowledged findings in epidemiology that marriage comes with a health and longevity boost for both women and men. The essay lacked citations to support most of its points; the citation linked to the claim about mortality pointed to a popular press article about a 25-year-old study of death records in Switzerland. A quick scan of the research literature shows that this an outlier finding. For example, a 2025 meta-analysis of 12 cohort studies, reflecting over 1.7M participants, found that all-cause mortality was higher in single individuals than in married individuals, whether or not they were male or female. Marriage is also associated with better mental health and greater sexual satisfaction for women.³

I was disappointed by the misinformation, because the essay otherwise made a valid argument: Marriage is frequently a better bargain for men than for women. Specifically, it’s well-established that men get a greater longevity benefit from marriage than women do. Married men live longer than single men, across the board. Women are more sensitive to the differential quality of marriage. An unhappily married woman might fare worse, health- and longevity-wise, than a single woman. The essay is also correct in stating that women do more unpaid household labor than their spouses and that an inequitable domestic workload can lead to burnout and frustration.

I’ll circle back to this last point, but first, on the other end of the political spectrum, the anti-feminist writer Inez Stepman published a bizarrely bad faith article last week claiming that the “girlboss” lifestyle is being artificially subsidized by taxpayers because a) women are disproportionately likely to do useless “email jobs” and b) “Women leaving the home en masse created a demand for a servant class” because “Someone has to cook, clean, and look after the children.” This article has so many leaps in logic that I could waste the rest of this essay trying to debunk them⁴, but for the purposes of this essay, I’ll focus on the second point. Stepman might be surprised to learn that wealthy women have been hiring wet-nurses, nannies, governesses, and scullery maids since long before the invention of email. Moreover, vis a vis this new “servant class,” Stepman went to the University of Virginia Law School, so I’m guessing she’s heard about slavery. I’ve been arguing for a while on here that the contemporary gender wars are really class wars, and this article proves my point.

Moreover, Stepman appears to live in a universe in which men do no domestic work, as her “Someone has to cook, clean, and look after the children” reflects. But a 2025 paper reporting on data from the American Time Use Study, our best source of changing trends in Americans’ behavior, tells a totally different story. There has been a striking convergence in men and women’s household labor over the last few decades.

These latest findings upend some commonly held wisdom in the field. Sociologists have been writing about a “stalled gender revolution” in unpaid household labor since the late 1980s, when Arlie Hochschild wrote The Second Shift. In the 1960s, married women did seven times more housework and four times more childcare than married men. Between the 1960s and the 1990s, as women surged into the workforce, that gap narrowed to about a two-to-one ratio. But then the trend lines seem to flatten out, so that the rate of women’s rising participation in the paid labor market outpaced men’s plateu-ing participation in unpaid household work. This discrepancy has launched a thousand think pieces and a cottage industry of self-help materials geared to frustrated wives.

The latest analysis looked specifically at time use trends from the last 20 years (from 2003-2023) and took a more sophisticated look at the data by testing a “differential convergence” model that broke housework into more granular categories, including “core” housework (tasks that need to be performed frequently, like cooking, cleaning, and laundry), “occasional” housework (a category that includes more male-typed tasks like yardwork and home repair), shopping, and childcare. That “core” category has historically been particularly “feminized” and thus considered more stubbornly resistant to change.

Contrary to the narrative that men have stalled out at home, married men’s housework contributions continued to rise during this period. As a result, the women-to-men ratio of homework time was 1.8:1 in 2003–2005 and 1.6:1 in 2022–2023. Even more striking, the shrinking gap was driven by changes in “core” housework, where it narrowed by 40 percent, from 4.2:1 to 2.5:1. Men in 2023 were especially likely to be doing more housecleaning and laundry than men in 2003. Men also spent more time shopping for essentials like groceries, gas, and food, such that the male-female ratio came close to 1:1. The childcare time gap shrunk too, from 2:1 to 1.8:1.

Convergingtrends in housework time, from Milkie, Sayer, Nomaguchi, & Yan, 2025

An interesting takeaway emerged when the researchers dug into why the gender gap was narrowing. The shrinkage was coming from both directions – that is, women were reducing their time as men were increasing theirs – but these changes occurred for different reasons. For women, housework time decreased largely because of demographics, or what is known as a cohort effect – a shift in terms of who was included in that sample of married women. We know that as women acquire more education and make more money, they spend less time in housework and are more likely to outsource household tasks (Stepman’s '“girlboss” thesis at play). Since more highly educated women are now more likely to get married, the category “married women” looks demographically different in 2023 than it did in 2003, and that explains the decrease.⁵ But demographics did not fully explain the changes in men’s behavior. As the authors wrote, “The decrease in women’s housework time was predominantly driven by compositional changes in the variables included in the analysis, particularly increased education, paid work hours, and income….In other words, women have changed because of important other changes in their lives…related to their resources. Men, on the other hand, are changing even faster and in a way that scholars could consider may be counter to a “stall”… Indeed, married men seem to have gone against the grain in changing toward a more gender-neutral world of unpaid work.”

So there you have it. Men’s increasing housework time appears to reflect a real cultural shift and not just a demographic artifact or a selection effect. A close reader might point out that the gender gap in “core” housework is still 2.5 to 1, still far from egalitarian. But considering that it was 4:1 in 2003, that’s a meaningful shift. Moreover, the latest data we have on Gen Z fathers suggest that they are doing more hands-on care of their children, even more so than millennial dads, and that they endorse a desire to be involved as parents, so it’s possible the trend lines will converge even more in the next 20 years.

We’ve been through a lot of cultural transition within a relatively short time period, and it’s no surprise that changing values and expectations can create friction and frustration for both genders. But if you look past the toxicity of the online gender discourse, there’s reason for optimism.

MUSIC RECOMMENDATION OF THE WEEK

Past recs (Playlist link!): Broncho // Alvvays // Capitol Years // The Cairo Gang and Hard Quartet // The Beths // Ballerina Black // James Mercer // Playboy Carti & Car Seat Headrest // Weyes Blood // Matthew Sweet // Fontaines D.C. // Elvis Costello Spanish Model // Lily Allen // Geese // Olivia Tremor Control // Wake Up Dead Man // Beulah // Rosalia // A$AP Rocky // Dirty Projectors // Mitski // Foxygen // Teenage Fanclub //Aimee Mann // Nick Lowe // Mary Timony // The Pretty Flowers // Night Moves

GUIDED BY VOICES

It’s taken me way too long to write about this band. I actually maintain a Guided By Voices themed instagram account for my cats that has surprisingly never managed to go viral. As an indie rock fan who grew up in Ohio in the 90s, I am compelled to love GBV, and I do. I saw them eight times between 1994-2004, which is more times I’ve seen any other band that I’m not in, or married to a member of. The first time, they played at the Oberlin College Disco during my junior year of high school, and I rode my bike across town to sneak into the show. Not only was it a momentous, wonderful, beer-soaked rollick through the genius album Bee Thousand, but KIM DEAL WAS AT THE SHOW, a huge deal for a Pixies/Breeders fan like me. I went up to her and told her that I played guitar, too, and she was totally nice about the least interesting thing that anyone could have said to her.

Anyway, like I said, I really love Bee Thousand. Here’s the biggest hit from that album.

I also have a soft spot for Do the Collapse, their 1999 release, which was produced by Ric Ocasek (!!). It was their attempt to sound less lo-fi and write songs that were longer than one minute. I caught their tour for this album at Bowery Ballroom in NYC.

1. After we moved out, in a very on-the-nose example of gentrification, it became a three-story Urban Outfitters (and my husband’s recording studio became a J. Crew)

2. A firefighter-in-training once came to our party at the apartment and told one of my roommates, ominously, “I’ll see you again….when I rescue you.” Hot stuff! Like, literally, hot, like an oil drum on fire.

3. It’s likely that many of these findings reflect a selection effect rather than a causal one: On average, healthier, happier people are more likely to get and stay married.

4. Re: “email jobs”: The two most common professions for women are teaching and nursing, whereas the most common white-collar professions for men are management and software development. The latter two jobs both involve a lot of email!

5. Another way to explain this is that if you sampled only the most educated women back in 2003, you’d probably see similar amounts of time spent in housework as the most educated women are spending in 2023 - but since the number of college-educated women in the “married women” sample has grown in those 20 years, the overall average looks different.