COMPILED BY MACEY SHOFROTH and EMILY BARSKE WOOD
This coverage is from the Business Record’s annual survey on women’s and gender issues as part of our Fearless initiative. While nonscientific, we believe the results of this questionnaire illustrate current opinions about Iowa women’s equity in and outside of work. Read previous coverage here.
We asked: If you live with a partner, who does the majority of the work in your house? How do you split up responsibilities?
“If one cooks, the other cleans. One takes children to appointments, the other takes animals to vet appointments. The work is shared.”
“I prefer doing the physical work such as laundry, cleaning, mowing and shoveling, and household repairs. I do not cook, so that is my spouse’s responsibility along with grocery shopping and running errands. He doesn’t mind doing those things and thankfully so, because those are tasks that I have no desire to do and likewise for him with the tasks I have accepted responsibility for.”
“We do not split up the work by gender, we both do what we can when we can.”
“Both of us work, but she works part-time. We split most household chores 50-50; however, she takes care of the kids (ages 4 and 1) disproportionally more than I do.”
“50-50 split.”
“It’s more 50-50 as he is recently retired. Until then it was 70-30. I still do the majority of the household chores.”
“I do. While my husband does take the lead on doing laundry and cleaning bathrooms (he works from home and has more availability that way), it is up to me to do most of the grocery shopping, making sure kids’ needs are met, making sure any and all communication with their schools takes place, making sure bills are paid, etc.”
“We are equitable with physical labor, but I still handle much of the mental, emotional and familial labor despite my constant efforts to offload.”
“It is pretty equally split with no clear split between traditional gender roles. We both typically will mow the lawn, empty dishwasher, cook, clean, etc., if we know it needs to get done. I’m pregnant right now and therefore frequently very tired, so my husband has stepped up and actually taken on more than me.”
“He thinks we split things evenly. He is dead wrong.”
“My wife probably does more than 50% of the work, as she does laundry, meal prep and dishes. I do the tasks she does not want to do, vacuuming, dusting, repairs, tax returns, finances.”
“We split household responsibilities. I am the breadwinner in our household, so I don’t do any of our cooking, laundry or grocery shopping, but I do most of the cleaning, although often we’ll split that up. I do most of the household decorating and hosting and we split up caring for kids and dogs. However, I still take on the mental load of doctor appointments, school sign-up, trip planning, packing for vacations, etc. This is something that isn’t talked about – men typically see household responsibilities as tangible things – mowing the yard, housework, etc.; what’s often not talked about is the invisible mental load that women take on. I have two sons and I often talk to them about not weaponizing their incompetence about not knowing how to do something and not doing it simply because they don’t know how to. Women don’t know how to do a lot of things but we have just figured it out by trial and error because someone has to. And because of this, we end up carrying a lot of the mental load for the household.”
“Division of work is very flexible. We have preferred tasks, or tasks that our partner loathes. We float between these tasks as we have capacity, like it or not.”
“I generally perceive our split of the work in our house as fairly equitable. There are times I feel like I’m doing more, and times when I feel like my wife is doing more. However, I am also aware of research showing that men tend to think they’re doing a larger proportion of the household work than they actually are, so I am sensitive to the possibility that my perceptions are not correct. Much of how we split responsibilities is that we each do the chores that the other one hates the most. One point of occasional friction is that there are things that really bother me when they’re dirty/cluttered/etc. that my wife doesn’t seem to notice, and the opposite is also true; there are things that bother her that I don’t really notice.”
“My husband and I split ‘chore’ responsibilities within our household, although as is typical in hetero households, I am the primary caregiver. This means that I am day care pickup/drop-off 90% of the time, I cook 75% of our meals, I schedule all appointments, and I handle household finances such as our mortgage and utilities. My husband’s work schedule dictates day care and mealtime responsibilities.”
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