When Frank Stafford examined diaries kept by men and women on how much time they spent on cooking, cleaning, and other household chores, he found that women who were married, and especially those with children, took on much greater amounts of household chores than single women without children. Women with husbands pick up about 7 extra hours a week, while men with wives saved themselves about an hour a week. “It’s a well-known pattern,” Stafford says. And it’s not as unequal today as in 1976, when wives and husbands averaged 26 and 6 hours per week, respectively, in household chores.

More about Stafford finds women who marry gain an extra 7 hours of housework per week while men who marry lose an hour >