Women still take care of more than two thirds of household chores, but men assure that they are not inactive and use several arguments to justify their lesser investment.
There is still a long way to go to achieve equality between men and women, even at home. According to the Observatory of Inequalities, women managed 70% of household chores in the 1980s and more than 40 years later they are still in charge of 66% of these tasks. Men and fathers are not inactive when it comes to taking care of the house, or children when there are any, some even say they want to prioritize family life in a study by the Department of Research, Studies, Evaluation and Statistics (DREES)whose second report is published this Thursday, January 23. However, we observe a clear gap between the expressed desire and the real investment of the fathers interviewed.
The unequal distribution of household work is suggested by the choice made by the majority of men not to reduce the time allocated to professional activities. “If fathers spontaneously see this option for their partner, describing her job as more flexible or valuing her maternal qualities and her wish to be more present with the children, few of them think about it for themselves,” concludes the study which confirms the trend: of the 49 men interviewed for the study, only 4 are unemployed and 3 part-time, all the others work full-time and do not plan to do less, preferring to change their organization.
An observation which is not without importance since work is one of the main “excuses” used by men to explain their investment, lower than that of women, in the management of household tasks. Whether by the length of working days, when they are longer than those of the partner, or by incompatible late hours, several men put forward the argument of lack of availability in the study: “Often, when I comes back, my partner has started to look after the children or carry out household chores such as cooking, cleaning or taking care of the laundry.
And although teleworking has become more common, it does not seem to have had any real impact on the distribution of tasks, despite a greater presence of men at home. Several participants in the study recognize that teleworking allows them to “lend a helping hand” or “optimize time”, but only for small tasks such as doing laundry or vacuuming. The fact remains that many still prioritize work, without doing more according to the study’s observations. Which adds that, unlike women who work remotely, they tend to see their share of household chores increase.
Men claim to take care of “big” household chores
If work acts as a brake on men’s investment during the week, they make up for it on weekends, both with children and with household chores. And some believe they do the “heavy” work on their days off, underlines the Drees study. “I do the big shopping a lot. And my wife will rather manage the small daily errands,” explains one, while another indicates doing “the big cooking [pour tenir] a little during the week”. Some go so far as to consider their method more effective, particularly when it comes time to do the big cleaning: “When I do the cleaning, I want to start with the things that are super urgent. In fact, I tend to go to the essentials, I do things in order of priority. [Ma conjointe] wants to do the thing from top to bottom”.
A vision of things which reflects a rhetoric borrowing from the code of masculinity and far from being trivial according to the Drees: “It highlights activities with effects described as perceptible, while female domestic work is relegated to the continuity of tasks more invisible. Especially since all the stories mention the woman’s additional, but more regular, work to “go to the market on weekends” or “stop at a convenience store” for a “small” supply, to “manage a small evening meals” or for all the “small” tasks such as laundry care.
The men interviewed do not seem to want to minimize their wife’s involvement in the management of daily tasks, but rather to assert their own. And as if to justify the discrepancy, many men indicated that they had lower standards than their partner in terms of housekeeping. Different expectations which would explain the greater investment of the woman compared to that of a less demanding man as summarized by a participant in the study: “She, it has to be perfect all the time. Me, I’m less careful about that, but I still do it. She’s going to do a little more than me, I won’t hide it from you.”