Fifty years of the sexual revolution and four waves of feminism have succeeded in increasing women’s workforce participation and average educational attainment. However, it still hasn’t gotten men to, just once, wipe down the kitchen counters before going to bed.
That’s the repeated social science finding lamented across academia and the media — and reinforced by two recent studies.
Even though they’re “open-minded” and use woke “pronouns,” young people, the New York Times laments, “are holding on to traditional views about who does what at home.”
Gallup, in a recent survey, interviewed couples who were either married or shacking up and asked who did more of the given chores. It turns out that the younger, more feminist generation doesn’t divide chores evenly. In fact, a young male millennial or Gen Zer living with his girlfriend or wife is not significantly more likely than a baby-boom man to do most of the laundry, child care, or dishwashing. Cooking is the only area where the 18-34 crowd is significantly more egalitarian than the older folks.
Part of the story is that many couples still have the old-fashioned economic arrangement in which the man does the work that makes money while the woman does the work that keeps the house in order. Dual-income families are more likely (47%) to split child care evenly than to leave it mostly up to the woman (44%). Where there’s a sole breadwinner, on the other hand, women do most of the child-raising in 61% of the homes, according to Gallup.
This division of labor makes sense. It’s also true that men are more likely than women to want to work full-time jobs outside of the home. Even in our “open-minded” times, it seems that preference rather than “tradition” determines the shape of household life in 2020.
One recent survey of high-school seniors in the journal Sociological Science found that the “husband-as-earner/wife-as-homemaker arrangement remained most desired.” A massive study of 80,000 individuals published in 2018 found, in the words of Scientific American, that “greater national wealth and gender equality are tied to bigger differences in preferences between men and women rather than to stronger similarities.”
The persistence of gender roles is very upsetting to the academics and reporters who have come across it.
“Surprisingly, young couples today are not that much more egalitarian in dividing household chores than they were three-quarters of a century ago,” the New York Times caption notes.
Gallup illustrated its write-up with a photo of a faceless housewife carrying a toddler with one arm and pushing a vacuum cleaner with the other while her skinny jeans-clad man sits on the couch, idly fiddling with his smartphone.
The persistence of gender roles doesn’t tell us anything about human nature, sociologist Joanna Pepin told the New York Times. Instead, it’s “evidence that our beliefs about gender are really strong and sticky. … That’s yet another thing that’s getting in the way of social change.”
Don’t you hate it when human nature gets in the way of sociologists’ dreams?
