Equal Partnership Is Still A Struggle — Why Men and Women Do Different Amounts of Household Labor (Darcy Lockman)

#200 — Women have fought for equality in the workplace for a long time. From equal rights to equal pay, equality in the public sphere is a vocal conversation.

But what about our not-so-public lives? What about equal partnership in our lives at home?

For many women, there is nothing as maddening as coming home and realizing that there is the second shift and an incredible amount of work that disproportionately falls on your shoulders. For women across the country, this includes the domestic labor of the home, caring for children and all of the maintenance required from invisible labor to mental load. Some would call this emotional labor to the organizational and the logistical work. Well, it’s enough to drive people crazy, or to divorce.

The hardest part is that once children enter the picture, people who believe that they are in equal partnerships often find that women are still the ones that take on the burden of domestic work. 

One of the hardest parts is that fathers will take on a lot more work than their fathers did — up to 35% of the domestic load. Because their workload has increased so dramatically, it's infuriating to be told that you're not doing enough. Yet the data show that women take on 65% of the domestic load in even the best partnerships. And often, when women get divorced, they are happier post-divorce than men.

On this episode, originally aired in 2019, we invited Darcy Lockman on the show to talk about the unequal load at home. Darcy is a former journalist turned clinical psychologist and the author of a book called All The Rage: Men, Women and the Myth of Equal Partnership. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Psychology Today and Rolling Stone, among others. She lives with her husband and children in Queens. 

She joins us to talk about where the breakdown in equal partnership is most apparent, and why parenting tends to throw a wrench in most couples’ plans for equality.

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