Women are doing less housework than they used to, but they’re still doing more than men and they’re not happy about it.
New research shows that while men have started to pull their weight around the home, 85 percent of women still do most of the work, leading to increased stress levels.
Swedish researchers studied data from 371 women and 352 men collected in 1986 and 2007, when the respondents were an average age of 21 and 42 respectively.
The participants answered questions about their relationship, housework responsibilities and socioeconomic status. They were also asked how often they had felt restless, worried or nervous in the past 12 months.
At 21, male and female participants did similar amounts of housework and were equally stressed, but by the time they were 42, women were doing the majority of work around the home and were far more stressed than the men.
The stress worsened when other inequalities existed in the relationship, like women getting paid less than their partners for the same work.
“Domestic work is a highly gendered activity as women tend to have a greater and men a smaller responsibility,” the researchers wrote.
“Inequality in domestic work, in combination with experiencing the couple relationship as gender-unequal, were associated with psychological distress.”
The research was published in the journal PLoS ONE.
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