We’re all guilty of considering it, but have you ever performed a chore badly on purpose with the hopes of never being asked to do it again? It turns out that more than half of men admit to intentionally performing chores, such as washing the dishes or doing the laundry, badly, hoping that their partner won’t ask them to help again. A third of men also say that they have never even changed the bed sheets!
These revelations come from a recent survey we commissioned of 6,000 men and women from the USA, Australia and the UK. Unfortunately, despite the fact that we are now living in the 21st Century, gender stereotypes still seem to be very much in play when it comes to household chores.
We discovered that the average time per week that a single man spends on chores is an hour and twenty minutes and for a single woman it is an hour and fifty minutes. Yet when married, the amount of time a man spends doing chores drops to just thirty-five minutes a week on average, while for women it jumps up to over two and a half hours – almost five times more than their male counterparts!
When the results were broken down geographically, American men were the worst culprits for doing the least amount of housework – less than a fifth (18%) of American men help with chores on a daily basis. This was followed by Australian men, where a quarter (26%) help out with the chores, while in the UK, two fifths (39%) of men help out on a daily basis.
Men aren’t the only ones skimping on the housework either. Just a third of respondents with children say that their kids regularly help with housework, and the majority (72%) have to incentivise their children with money to get them chipping in with the chores.
According to parents, teenagers do far less housework than ever before, with two thirds revealing their teenage children believe they should be paid for helping out. On average UK parents pay their children $5 a week to do housework, American parents pay $8.50 a week and Australian parents pay $8.75*
Here at Maid2Match we have a great mix of male and female cleaners working for us, so we know that men are perfectly capable of changing bed sheets and doing the dishes. However, it appears that once they get into a relationship they start to slack off, leaving the burden of cleaning on their female partner.
In an attempt to motivate partners and children that may be slacking come chore time, we have created a congratulatory certificate that can be awarded for the completion of various chores. We have also created a printable reward chart so that households can keep track of the progress being made. This should especially help the quarter of men we surveyed who felt like they deserved more praise for the work they do around the house.
Check out our chore certificate and reward chart below to keep track of their progress:
Toby Schulz, CEO and co-founder of Maid2Match said,
“We were quite surprised at how traditional the majority of families and couples still are with how they designate cleaning responsibilities. We have a significant number of male cleaners working for us, but it appears that outside of the cleaning industry, the duty of chores still falls mainly on the woman’s shoulders.”
“Considering how much society has evolved over the last seventy years, where just as many women work full-time as do men, it seems unfair that they are still the ones who are picking up the dirty socks or vacuuming the house at the weekend. Obviously many households outsource cleaning now, and based on what some of our customers are telling us, for them it comes down to not wanting to regularly argue about who does what chores! But maybe our cleaning certificate will act as a fun tongue in cheek way for women to address the imbalance they are evidently still experiencing at home!”
*In Australian dollars
