Well, this should be a fun subject! There are a lot of factors that go into how household chores get divided up between husband and wife, and today we want to give you guidance as to how to do that without creating any unnecessary conflict or resentment.

Have you and your spouse ever had an argument over whose turn it is to do the dishes? Or do you ever resent your spouse for doing less around the house than you? Issues around the division of labor are common in most marriages and there’s a lot to unpack in terms of what society expects men and women to be involved with and what you each perceive as being “normal” or “fair”. And the research shows that it’s that perception of fairness that’s key to diving the work in a way that leads to a happy, distress-free marriage.

Unequal Division of Household Work

According to a piece of research by Breen & Cooke[i], husband’s contribution to household work is on average one third of the time that the wife puts in. This ratio, they claim, has persisted even with the increase in women having full time jobs and financial autonomy. Women still take most responsibility for, and spend the most time on, household tasks.

This is not due to any kind of power-struggle within the marriage and is not caused by different amounts of time available. "Rather, it is the non-conscious ideology developed from parental modeling that preserves traditional sex roles[ii]”. Meaning that women naturally end up doing more of the housework because that’s how things worked in their parent’s house and that’s still considered the norm in most of society.

So, do we have a gender inequality issue? I think that’s the question that we have to start with.

These researchers go on to say that we need to get past gender inequality. Women do more unpaid work around the house than men, irrespective of whether they work and the amount of time those women have available. And this often comes from expectations and from unacknowledged ideas about gender roles.

So, the researchers say, you need to work to balance this out.

But: not so fast.

Let me make a few points, and we have to keep all these points together. If you quote me on only one of them I’m going to sound like a liberal and the other, I’ll sound like a misogynist — we all know what that word means since the last US election, right?

I’d like to give a balanced perspective on this.

First, the Bible calls on husbands to live with their wives in an understanding way (1 Peter 3:7). The Bible puts the onus on us as husbands to be considerate.

I think a lot of guys don’t think through their own assumptions and don’t understand why their wife is disappointed about how chores get divided up. I want to challenge husbands to be the leaders in this discussion — not leading in the sense of authoritative decision making but leaders in the sense of facilitating an open, understanding, receptive discussion about how each of you feel about how fairly you divide up the housework and childcare.

So husbands need to be particularly considerate of the possibility that their wives are working harder than they are.

Equality vs Fairness

The next point to this section is that we also need to consider that there is a difference between equal and fair. I’m not talking about whether you and your wife are equals. You are. There’s nothing to discuss there. I’m talking about the equal division of labor vs. the fair division of labor.

An equal division and a fair division might not always be exactly the same. You may disagree on the equality of the division and feel that one of you does more than the other, including the outside work you do. Or you may agree on the equality of the division of labor but feel that it is unfair. For example, if Verlynda and I split hours of household 50/50 and I work outside the home and Verlynda doesn’t I might say, that’s equal household hours but to me, it still feels unfair.

The next couple, however,