I thought about this while reading the Gender Equity Policy Institute's recent report on gender and domestic labor. The study finds that mothers spend twice as much time as fathers 'on the essential and unpaid work' of taking care of kids and the home, and that women spend more time on this than men, regardless of parental and relationship status. 'Simply being a woman' is the instrumental variable, the study concludes. The time gaps are large for all women, and especially large for certain subgroups. Moms with a high-school education or less spend 19 hours a week on cleaning and child care, versus seven hours for dads with a comparable education. Latina mothers devote 26 hours a week to chores and kids, Latino dads less than a third of that time. Remarkably, having a male domestic partner means more work for women, not less. Married women spend more time on housework than single women; married men spend roughly the same amount as single men. Women's lower wages and higher...
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