Melissa A. Milkie, Liana C. Sayer, Kei Nomaguchi, and Hope Xu Yan, “Who’s Doing the Housework and Childcare in America Now? Differential Convergence in Twenty-First-Century Gender Gaps in Home Tasks,” Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, 2025

“Housework” by pasukaru76 is marked with CC0 1.0.

Today, researchers estimate that women do twice as much housework as men. While the gender gap in unpaid domestic labor shrank substantially over the second half of the 20th century, it stabilized in the mid-1990s, with women still shouldering a larger amount of housework and childcare. So what do these twentieth-century trends mean for the division of domestic labor in the twenty-first century? Who’s doing the housework and childcare in American households today?

Melissa Milkie and colleagues answer these questions using time diary data from the American Time Use Survey. This survey captures married men and women’s time spent on daily housework and childcare activities and the researchers focused on changes in the data between 2003 and 2023. Overall, the authors found that while married women still do more housework and childcare than married men, the gender gap has gradually narrowed over the twenty-first century. 

The biggest change in housework was found in men’s increased participation and women’s decreased participation in traditionally “feminine” tasks like cooking, cleaning, and laundry. In 2003, married women spent 4.2 times as many hours on these core housework tasks as married men, but today that ratio has dropped to 2.5 times – a 40% decrease. 

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated these shifts. In 2020, both men and women increased their housework time. By 2023, women’s average housework time returned to pre-pandemic levels, while men maintained their higher housework involvement. Men’s increased participation in core housework activities like cooking and cleaning since the pandemic marks an important shift in their behavior – signaling greater gender convergence in traditionally feminine tasks. Lastly, the gender gap in childcare also notably shrank slightly between 2003 and 2023. Women average 1.8 hours of childcare per day compared to men’s 1 hour, the smallest gender gap in childcare time recorded in the past 60 years

The authors also explored why these shifts were happening. Married women’s reduced housework time can be attributed to broader population shifts over the 21st century, primarily increased income and education among women. From 2003 to 2023, married men started doing more housework, likely because ideas about gender roles at home changed and partners began expecting a more equal share of chores. The pandemic period, in particular, signals a crucial moment in the twentieth century for changes in men’s unpaid domestic labor, with married men and fathers increasing and maintaining their hours in domestic labor. 

While the pace of change has slowed and women still do more, the gender gap in unpaid domestic labor time is shrinking – primarily driven by married men’s increased time and married women’s decreased time in traditionally feminine housework tasks. This study suggests that the gender gap in domestic labor has not stalled, but rather changed in significant ways as gender roles continue to evolve and adapt in twenty-first-century couples.