Friday morning May 21, 2021
Good morning.
As some of you know, I sent a small survey to a number of married couple friends. I promised to report the results. Herewith that report. Perhaps the results and comments are of interest even to those who did not participate.
The survey:
After reading a couple of articles on household division of duties pre-pandemic and during the pandemic (and how women seem to do more of them almost no matter the circumstances), I'm curious to know how long-married couples divide up household labor. Four areas come to mind:
1. washing dishes (i.e., rinsing, loading/unloading the dishwasher)
2. laundry
3. cleaning (e.g., dusting and vacuuming; I know that some have people come in to clean, so in those cases this one's irrelevant)
4. cooking
Seems like there are three general possibilities: mostly the woman does it, mostly the man does it, or the task is shared more or less equally. (And yes, I may report the results in an upcoming email epistle, when I get around to writing another one, but always anonymously, of course. I'm not sending this to friends who are gay couples because there's no sex difference.)
One friend's opening comment in the response made me laugh. "Hi Gary, Ah, do you ever wish you'd had a chance to do some major social science research!?" I beg your pardon, but this *is* major social science research! (OK, maybe not.) In real life, I did do three pieces of social science research (I won't call them "major"), one on the Fourth Amendment, one on college grading, and one on athletics in higher education. Those, however, are long behind me and my days of doing "real" research are done.
I have used the symbol ♀ for woman and ♂ for man. Wikipedia: "The three standard sex symbols are the male symbol ♂ and the female symbol ♀, and the hybrid symbol ×. They were first used to denote the effective sex of plants . . . by Carl Linnaeus in 1751. . . . These symbols are derived from the initial letters of the Ancient Greek names of the classical planets Mars, Venus and Mercury." Obviously, I didn't need the "x" because no one admitted to being a hybrid.
As any good researcher will do, I must identify the limitations on the conclusions one can draw from the findings. There are a few.
(1) The Holy Grail of social science research is generalizability. Obtaining a truly random small sample of a large population allows one to make claims about the population based on the sample. (For those who are skeptics, there is a huge amount of research on inferential statistics that demonstrates clearly that 1,000 – 2,000 people can be sampled to provide a picture of a population of over 200 million with a high degree of confidence. The key is obtaining a truly random sample, which is the problem that political pollsters face—and their difficulties are compounded because people may not answer questions honestly.)
I do not know what population I am trying to sample; it may be "friends of Gary and Kathy." My sample is confined to people who (with one exception) live in or have lived in Minnesota, it is largely over the age of 60, its income levels are significantly above the median, and its average educational levels are much higher than the population at large. My sample is not random nor is it large, so the results are certainly not generalizable to Minnesota or any other population. I had 32 responses.
The median household income in Minnesota in 2020 was $81,426.[1] Of course, I don't know the income of any of the households in my sample except my own, but I surmise that the median of my sample is markedly above $81,000. The median household retirement income in the U.S. in 2019 (I can't find Minnesota data) in 2019 was $56,632.[2] That number seems high to me, but in any case, ditto what I said about household income: I am reasonably certain that the majority of my sample who are retired have a household income significantly above $56,000.
In 2020, 36.1% of Minnesotans had obtained a bachelor's degree or higher[3]; in my sample, it is probably 100% or close to it (in a few cases, I don't know about spouses).
I will claim that education level affects how a couple distributes the work in the household. More educated people are less likely to have stereotypical views of who's to do what in a home: the wife isn't expected to do the housework and cooking and the husband isn't expected to be the sole breadwinner. As income rises, so does the ability to hire people to perform tasks that most don't wish to do (e.g., house cleaning), so there's no assignment of work to either spouse.
(2) My survey instrument was flawed. Several pointed out that my list appears to be biased toward what have been, traditionally anyway, women-centered chores. Others observed that my list was too short. Anyone doing good survey research will develop the instrument and then pretest it on a small sample. I did not do that; I would have revised it had I done so.
A number of respondents listed other tasks. (1) shopping and garbage ♂, yardwork ♂ more. (2) "You didn't ask about other household tasks - gardening, fixing, things, moving furniture, building things, grocery shopping, etc., these are done mostly by my husband." (3) In one case, because of age-related aches and pains (back, hip, knees), the ♀ does more of the items on my list, but "he does things I hate to do like taxes, bills, car stuff, household repairs." (4) Shopping: Shared. Finances (bill paying, investments, cash flow): Primarily me (♂) with some input on investments from an uninterested ♀. Grandkid babysitting, including changing poppy diapers: Shared, all the way down to the butt wiping. Elderly care: Shared between my mom and her parents." In the "other tasks" category, one friend wrote that "I don't mind going to the market, but if it ain't on the list it's unlikely to get purchased."
Yet more, same theme: (5) "Exterior - ♀ does most gardening, with help - this is her entertainment. ♂ does mowing, dandelion pulling. We split other lawn duties. ♂ does snow removal, usually with assistance. Shopping - We do this together almost always. Maintenance - ♂ does electrical work and HVAC work like changing filters. ♂ and ♀ both do plumbing work like faucet and toilet repair/replacement. ♀ does painting/patching of walls." Our electrical and plumbing work is done by people we call in. If we tried to do it ourselves, we have water everywhere and we'd be dead from electrical shock. (6) I'm curious "why you leave out questions on those chores which, a generation ago, were largely masculine chores (lawn mowing, snow shoveling, etc.)."
Finally, one light-hearted rebuke along the same line. "Damn survey. To answer your question, ♀ does almost all of those things, even more so since she has retired. In my defense, the lists of tasks that couples divide up is, of course, a much larger one than you have selected. I believe, and perhaps ♀ agrees, that in totality I pull my weight with our joint tasks. (Which, of course, I should, since she has worked full time her whole life.)"
Some identified very specific additional tasks that I omitted. "Cleaning sinks and countertops - ♀; mowing the lawn or snow blowing - mostly ♀; washing windows and siding, garbage & recycling, cat box and vomit clean-up – all ♂." "Other jobs are more specific: I do the bookkeeping and filing to get ready for taxes while ♂ is more interested in investments. ♂ manages the cars and car maintenance. He also does more of the yard work. I tend to be the person responsible for maintaining family and social networks, although we each have our own as well."
Two friends questioned my leaving out gay couples. The reasons are simple. First, my intention was to look at sex differences. Second, I don't know enough gay couples that any answers would mean anything. Yes, my sample size is biased and small, but at least I have enough responses in the group to look at patterns that might emerge. "To the extent that someone wants to argue that the division of chores is a result of biology or culture or something else, I think gay couples might be a sort of interesting 'control group.'" Probably true, but as I said, I don't have the numbers to do that.
There were several comments focused on cooking. "Mostly ♀, but with ♂ sometimes as sous chef to help with chopping, shredding cheese, cooking rice, etc. and for general mid-prep clean-up. ♂ does almost all the baking, although that is mostly chocolate chip cookies which ♂ eats and ♀ doesn't." Another friend wrote that "I do all the cooking because 99% of the time I want to. I love cooking and trying new recipes. The real chore isn't cooking, though, it is figuring out what we want to eat!" One said that "my wife loves to cook, I do not, so I do other things and she cooks." "Usually ♀. I manage about one meal a week and know I should do more." "I supplement ♀'s outstanding cooking. I do all grilling, a few special desserts and some main course, all told, maybe 20% of the total at most, but some. Recently, I have moved into some sous chef duties . . . I am great at slicing and dicing herbs!" One of my women friends bewailed the cooking (she does almost all of it):
For the record—the planning and organizing of meals is by far the most burdensome chore, in my opinion. It takes such energy to come up with a meal that is healthy, tasty and will please most people. If I could hire a person to do a chore (besides cleaning, which is #1), it would be a chef! Even though I like to cook, it is the constant need for food that wears me out!"
It is clear that for many couples, breakfast and lunch are "on our own." In three cases, the cooking is "shared" because the couple rarely eats together, so they cook their own meals.
One practice that several couples indicated they follow that surprised me: they each do their own laundry. If I had to wait to have a full washing load before doing it, I'd run out of several items of clothing! But in some cases, there is no choice. "I'm [the ♂] not allowed to do the wash. I should bring my dirty clothes to the laundry room and they will be returned clean to my office for folding. That's my job. It gets done, but the pace is rather slow by any measure. I very often get scowled at for the huge pile of clean clothes awaiting my attention or a reminder that, 'I have no more socks, so I'll just buy more.'"
A couple of comment made me chuckle. "I do the cleaning. It's important to me. Not so much to ♂." "We are slobs. ♀ probably does more cleaning, but either of us will vacuum or sweep if it gets too much for us to stand." One male confessed that "I am tasked with most of the cleaning which I am frequently delinquent about." In several instances, the couple consulted or responded independently and the compared notes. One wrote back to me, with a copy to his wife, "I'll hit send and see if we are still married thereafter."
As for other tasks I omitted, one friend observed that "You left off childcare, which is a marker of our ages!" As another observed, however, some take on the role of grandchild care.
The pandemic appears to have had no effect on the allocation of tasks. Retirement, however, did. "During our 42-year marriage, I was the primary breadwinner, working 50-60 hours per week and traveling. ♀ was the primary caretaker of the home and our three kids. That's not to say that I didn't help out around the house, but it wasn't my priority. Since I retired, I've picked up a few household tasks." "Cleaning. This one isn't relevant. We don't believe in cleaning. (Heh heh. I do [it] now. ♂ did for the last ~40 years when I was working full time, so payback.)" "Post-pandemic (and ♂'s retirement), he now does more of the cooking, and when he cooks, I clean up afterwards." "When I retired but ♀ did not, I did almost all these chores. When she retired, we split them up." There were other similar comments.
One comment echoed the "primary breadwinner" description. "I work a full time job which frequently requires evening and weekend work and irregular hours. ♀ works approximately 10 hours per week, scheduled weeks in advance." The large majority, however, fell in this camp: "We both do all of these. It likely comes from having equal job responsibilities for 30+ years before we retired." Or, in the case of another dual-career couple: We "are essentially interchangeable parts when it comes to most domestic tasks."
It's also true, as a friend pointed out, "personal histories matter," such as who had what jobs when and what professional responsibilities played out over time and what models they had when growing up. In my own personal history, I grew up seeing my dad wash dishes and do some of the vacuuming and dusting, so it never occurred to me that I wouldn't do them as well.
Personal characteristics matter, too. "I have to constantly work at 'seeing things that need to be done,' both because it's not my normal role and not in my nature. [My wife] is very task oriented and doesn't procrastinate. I am not task oriented and like to procrastinate." A similar comment came from another friend. "Generally speaking, I think the woman notices things that need to be done sooner than the man does, at least that's the case here."
One wise observation: "Are things fair? I suppose to us fairness is simply what we agree to without coercion." And, presumably, without resentment. "We only started doing what we naturally gravitated to. Now I'm trying to learn more about the cars, and he's trying to learn more about cooking 😊"
All those caveats and comments in the record, here's my analysis. Surprisingly, most everyone's responses allowed for a reasonably clean categorization:
♀ or ♂ (that is, either the ♀ or the ♂ did virtually all of it)
mostly ♀ or mostly ♂
slightly more ♀ or more ♂
shared (more or less 50/50)
All table cells total 32.
|
4 ♂ 3 mostly ♂ 5 more ♂ 11 shared 4 more ♀ 1 mostly ♀ 4 ♀
|
Laundry
4 ♂ - mostly ♂ - more ♂ 14 shared 1 more ♀ 3 mostly ♀ 10 ♀ |
|
Cleaning
1 ♂ 2 mostly ♂ 2 more ♂ 6 shared 6 more ♀ 2 mostly ♀ 4 ♀
3 cleaners 4 cleaners ♀ residual 2 cleaners ♂ residual
|
Cooking
- ♂ - mostly ♂ 2 more ♂ 8 shared 6 more ♀ 8 mostly ♀ 8 ♀ |
So, what are we to make of these results? One, that arrangements vary widely for a variety of reasons. Two, even in this highly educated and overwhelmingly professional population, three of these four ("traditionally" women's) household chores (laundry, cleaning, and cooking) continue to fall more heavily on the woman's shoulders than on the man's. Anecdotal evidence, however, suggests that other tasks fall more to the men and there is balance acceptable to both spouses. Perhaps interesting is that this division of labor is one that would have been familiar to our parents in the 1950s. (At least among the kids I grew up with, however, there is no way that 9 of 32 households would have had cleaners.) What might well be different from the 1950s is that the modal response in all four categories is "shared." To the extent that's a change from previous decades, it signals at least a slight shift of responsibility from women to men.
* * *
A friend of mine suggested I read Philip Larkin's poem "Aubade." "Though perhaps not late at night when sleepless." We then had a short exchange about it. First, the poem. The text in bold I mentioned in the subsequent messages. My friend suggested that "for maximum enjoyment of his dark humor, read aloud, even quietly to yourself."
I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
—The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.
This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.
And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.
Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.
My first reaction was that "well, that's not exactly uplifting or a day-brightener. It does capture how I sometimes feel, I must admit, because (I think) I share the view of the poem: [the language in bold]. Like everyone else, however, I don't think about it on a daily basis. Not at all, in fact. I suspect that it is only the denial that keeps us all going. That and the pleasures of life."
My friend agreed. "Ha, yes, not exactly. Larkin's poetry is mostly like this: bleak and ironic, but elegantly constructed and spiked with dark humor. 'That vast moth-eaten musical brocade. . . . ' I listened recently to an interview with a Buddhist writer who suggested that (not a new idea) Americans are more culturally avoidant than others in the world when it comes to thinking about our mortality. Maybe coming up on 70 had me thinking this way a little more than in the past . . . maybe the pandemic too. And a writer acquaintance of mine . . . just died last week of a heart attack in his sleep, age 56."
I wrote back. "It's probably natural for almost all of us of our vintage to contemplate mortality more than we did when we were young. I don't think that's unhealthy as long as one doesn't dwell on it or become immobilized by fear. The recognition does (or should) prompt us to prepare (wills, disposition of property, all that mundane stuff). Beyond that, all we can do is enjoy the time left to us, perhaps make whatever additional contributions to society we are capable of, if we are so inclined, and let events play out as they will.
"A number of years ago Elliott was speculating on what it would be like to have perfect knowledge. He said one of the first things he'd want to know is when he was going to die. I quickly told him no, that's the one piece of knowledge he would *not* want to have. He thought about it for a minute and then agreed. We would all be paralyzed if we knew the date of our death. We all live daily as if we're immortal. We have to.
My friend agreed with me, and added: "The Shakers had a paradoxical saying: Live every day as if you will live forever, and live every day as if you will die tomorrow."
I liked that. "Paradox though it may seem to be, if you think about it, it makes sense. I can imagine that sometimes there will be a conflict between the two (e.g., saving money for the future versus going out for an elegant and expensive dinner with friends on your last night alive). Of course, we don't know when that "die tomorrow" is coming, so one implication (cover as much ground as possible) is unrealistic. Another implication, however, seems to me worth thinking about: do whatever you can to make sure your relationships (family and friends) are in order. That's a goal that's always worth pursuing, it seems to me."
* * *
Final comments on the cats. A friend wrote back, in response to my cat story, and told me "rather than think of it as 'I killed the cats,' think of it as 'I saved them from major trauma.' That has a much nicer spin and it's the truth." As I thought a little more about the circumstances, I concluded my friend is probably right. If I had surrendered the cats for adoption, they might have been in cages for some indeterminate time and then probably put down anyway because it is unlikely anyone would have wanted to adopt either one of them. (I have no idea how long the AHS keeps animals before putting them down.) They certainly would have been traumatized by being in cages for any length of time.
I also forgot to mention that I'm more stoic about this than my comments may have suggested. When one has lost a child, the loss of two cats gets put in perspective. Moreover, these were the 6th and 7th cats I've had to put down. It's never routine, and it is always sad because we love our cats, but I've done this before.
One remarkable phenomenon: Kathy's allergic reactions cleared up almost instantaneously (i.e., within a couple of days) after the cats were gone and the house thoroughly cleaned. So now we are getting on with life while remembering with affection our furry little friends.
Warmly—
Gary
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSMNA646N
[2] https://www.newretirement.com/retirement/average-retirement-income-2021-how-do-you-compare/ "Reporting on average retirement income can be tricky. The best income data does not include information about whether someone is officially "retired" or not. Retirement has no official definition — with many "retirees" still working. Retirement is more of a mindset these days. However, for these purposes, we'll start with statistics for those over 65. Average Household Retirement Income 2021: Median Income — $56,632."
[3] https://www.towncharts.com/Minnesota/Minnesota-state-Education-data.html
