Husbands work harder than wives think

My only question is which of the two reports should come first.

Because there is a sort of cause-and-effect involved, the first report will cover what might cause a bad effect described in the second. It depends on how the results of the first report are followed.

Both sets of research data were reported in the Wall Street Journal. One was a study of 265 married couples with children that revealed husbands do a larger share of the housework than wives admit.

Conducted for the Journal of Marriage and Family, the research indicates that wives say their husbands do 33 percent of the housework; husbands actually do 39 percent. As might be expected, husbands say they do more, 42 percent. Also as might be expected, wives reported they performed 67 percent of housework but actually did 61 percent.

With gender perceptions differing from reality, how are the bona fide percentages obtained? According to Sue Shellenbarger, the WSJ columnist who reported on this data, and the data below, people wore watches that beeped every two hours to remind them to write down what they had been doing. Among the many activities logged in as housework chores were washing dishes, house cleaning, cooking, shopping, etc.

Please understand, I didn’t make up this stuff: Men do more household chores than they get credit for.

It follows that the average amount of time women spend doing housework is going down and the average amount of time men spend on housework is going up, as demonstrated by another study conducted in 2000 by University of Maryland researchers.

The WSJ column went on to say that women still feel burdened by household chores, more so than men. The stress becomes more acute in households where both husband and wife work, and it intensifies when child care is factored into the equation. In most cases, women believe – probably accurately – that they are likely to do more child-care chores.

Although husbands feel they are doing more work than they are getting credit for, wives believe hubbies need to do more. This suggests to me that husbands’ and wives’ perceptions of work done need to come closer together. If not, the result might echo the next story from the topic notebook with unpleasant results.

According to Sue Shellenbarger, in another of her Work & Family columns in WSJ, research funded by the National Institute on Aging found that being divorced for long periods of time seems to be linked to higher rates of chronic illness and loss of mobility in later life. It’s hard to believe, but true.

The co-authors of the study, comprising 8,652 people ages 51 to 61, were from Chicago and Duke University. The study itself resulted in the coining of a new term, “marital biography,” which attempts to chart the lifelong experience of marriage, divorce and remarriage.

You married couples who can’t agree on how much housework each should do and who is doing how much need to pay attention here. Otherwise, your marital biography might not have a happy ending.

Think that’s an overstatement? The people surveyed who had never been divorced or widowed had 20 percent fewer chronic conditions diagnosed by physicians than those divorced or widowed. Apparently, stress brought on by divorce or death of a spouse is a prime cause of chronic conditions.

Among the reasons for additional stress cited by divorced respondents were single parenting, adapting to single life and having responsibility for all household decisions. What’s my point? Divvy up those responsibilities equally, smile about it, and you may avoid the squabbles that could lead to splitsville and all sorts of unhappy endings in your marital biography.

As for me, I like happy endings.

Joe McAdoo is former chairman of the communication department at Drury University.