The media popularizes studies reporting women’s greater amount of lime spent on housework and child care, concluding: women work two jobs, men work one But this is misleading. Women do work more hours inside the home, but men work more hours outside the home And the average man commutes farther and spends more time doing yardwork, repairs, painting. What happens when all of these are combined? The University of Michigan’s study (reported in the Journal of Economic Literature in 1991) found the average man worked sixty-one hours per week, the average woman fifty-six 24
Is this just a recent change in men? No. In 1975, the largest nationwide probability sampling of households found that when all child care, all housework, all work outside the home, commuting, and gardening wfere added together, husbands did 53 percent of the total work, wives 47 percent.2′