Babbling Blueberry

You’ve probably heard these stats before. From a NYTimes article about division of labor in couples:

“Social scientists know in remarkable detail what goes on in the average American home. And they have calculated with great precision how little has changed in the roles of men and women… break out the couples in which both husband and wife have full-time paying jobs. There, the wife does 28 hours of housework and the husband, 16. Just shy of two to one, which makes no sense at all.

The lopsided ratio holds true however you construct and deconstruct a family. “Working class, middle class, upper class, it stays at two to one,” says Sampson Lee Blair, an associate professor of sociology at the University at Buffalo who studies the division of labor in families.”

And then later on in the same article, there’s this stat that I haven’t seen before:

“Lesbian parents, gay parents and heterosexual fathers all look the same on paper when it comes to cooking and cleaning — they all report doing between 6 and 10 hours a week.”

Assuming these numbers are all based on sound and controlled studies, I can see two possible scenarios for all these conclusions to make sense together.

1. Heterosexual households are cleaner than same sex households because these households see 50% more housework.
2. Heterosexual fathers (I’m using fathers because the stat in the article refers to fathers) contribute more net dirtiness to a household and that negates the extra housecleaning done by heterosexual mothers.

(It’s also possible that heterosexual mothers are less efficient with their housework, but I find that an unlikely explanation for a number of reasons - women probably are trained more from a young age to do housework; lesbian parents and gay parents don’t do different amounts of housework; if women have more time pressures, they’ll likely have more pressure to be more efficient.)

Are there any studies on the relative cleanliness of different households? That would be a way to see which scenario is true. I have a hunch that the prize is behind door #2, but I’m not going to say anything for sure or why I have this hunch until there’s more info. Anybody who knows of such a study or is willing to conduct one?

Is the list of explanations longer than 2?

This is actually a really interesting article with a lot of other interesting points. I’ll probably wind up posting more entries about this article. But if you want to check it out before I get to writing those entries, I highly recommend it.