Photo: Roadside Attractions 
 
 Jessica Grose has an interesting piece for The New Republic observing — and also decrying — that husbands may be catching up with childcare and even cooking, but still do way less housework than women. (“When it comes to housecleaning,” she writes, “my basically modern, egalitarian marriage starts looking more like the backdrop to an Updike short story.”) 
 
 Grose casts around for explanations, but does not consider a possibility that probably explains a big part of the gap: Women in general just have higher standards of cleanliness than men do. People who care a lot about neater homes spend more time cleaning them because that makes them happy. And while I agree in general that domestic life requires more gender equality, the housework problem has a partial solution that’s simpler and more elegant: Do less of it. 
 
 Viewing housework inequality as entirely a phenomenon of exploitative men free-riding off of female domestic labor makes sense only if you think men derive equal enjoyment from a cleaner and neater home. If that were the case, men who lived by themselves, or with other men, would have to keep their own homes tidy until they could conscript a wife or girlfriend to do their cleaning. 
 
 Does anybody think that’s true? In college, I lived in a group house with newspapers for carpeting and pizza boxes stacked to the ceiling. My brother’s three-dude college apartment was so filthy it was condemned by the Ann Arbor board of health. It had a spilled milkshake on the floor that stayed there all year, forming a permanent, unearthly silver blob that became an object of curiosity. (To be clear, this was my brother, not me — I was content with the pizza box tower, but if it was my floor, I’d have cleaned up the milkshake.) My post-college group house was vastly neater than my college home, yet still messy enough that my girlfriend refused to set foot in it, insisting we spend all our domestic time at her place. 
 
 We’re now married, which seems like the proper place to note that the mental image you have probably formed of my domestic habits is not accurate. Mainly because I work at home, and her in the office, I handle more than half the parental responsibilities. I buy all the groceries, cook dinner every night, get the kids ready for school, and walk them in the morning. We split bedtime. If one of them gets sick, my wife still heads to work, and it’s up to me to take care of them. 
 
 When the kids were born, we got a housekeeper once a week. Obviously, that’s a luxury many people can’t afford. I mention it because, when Grose bemoans “the drudgery of vacuuming day in and day out,” I think, Really? Day in and day out? We pretty much figure the weekly vacuuming we pay for takes care of our vacuuming needs. The cover of New York, featuring Lisa Miller’s story on feminist housewives, has an image of a mom holding a duster. We don’t dust. Ever. 
 
 The assumption of much of the feminist commentary surrounding household chores assumes that there is a correct level of cleanliness in a heterosexual relationship, and that level is determined by the female. I think a little cultural relativism would improve the debate. The tidiness level of a home is a matter of simple preference with no right or wrong (except perhaps when you reach the antagonizing-municipal-authorities extremes of my brother’s pad.) My wife and I happily learned to converge on each other’s level of tidiness. We settled — fairly, I think — on a home that’s neater than I’d prefer to keep it, but less neat than she would. She does a little more housecleaning than I do. But it’s not that much more than the time I spend doing the man-work of trash-clearing, lightbulb-replacing, heavy-object-hauling, and screw-turning. 
 
 The tricky thing in allocating the responsibilities between partners is that not all “work” can be equated. This neat chart from Pew Research has been making the rounds: 
 
 Photo: Pew Research 
 
 All these things are not the same. Marching the kids through their morning checklist and getting them out the door is stressful work, where every morning feels like I’m trying to pass a bill through the Senate and my kids are Mitch McConnell. Walking them to school is nice. Reading Harry Potter to my daughter, or wrestling on the carpet with my son, is incredibly fun. All those things are “childcare.” Sometimes on weekdays, I have a sick kid on the sofa while I work in the room next door. Look — according to that chart, I performed nine hours of child care and nine hours of paid work! (Okay, eight — we took some story-time breaks.) 
 
 Housecleaning is all drudgery and zero fun. But while some of it (like laundry) is necessary, other parts are purely discretionary. I like having magazines strewn across the coffee table. My wife doesn’t. I won’t protest when she stacks them up somewhere, but when she does it, I don’t regard it as her participation in the shared household duties. She handles our household finances, which is a gigantic contribution, out of all proportion to the hours it consumes owing to its stressfulness. 
 
 Cooking lies in between, though it depends on the person. I don’t like cooking, especially — if I could magically conjure the meals instead of prepare them, I would. But it does come with the satisfaction of watching your family enjoy the meal, except that sometimes it comes with the frustration of your spouse coming home late and making it cold, or your kid announcing they won’t try it and marching to the pantry to make a peanut-butter sandwich. 
 
 A Pew-style chart of my household would show that I do both more paid work and more childcare than my wife — mainly because I don’t commute. But that would present an inaccurately slanted picture of our relative contributions. Having more time around the kids while she slogs through the Red Line is a perk I enjoy, not a cost I’m bearing. 
 
 For differing reasons, both feminists and anti-feminists have sandblasted away the distinction between different kinds of work, but the distinction matters. I think Grose’s general point, about the unequal demands faced by women, stands. But the specific indictment about housework doesn’t seem quite as solid. 
 
 Feminists want women to work like men do, right? Why not try living like men, too? Put down the duster. It’ll be okay. ||||| Only about 2 percent of commercials featuring men showed them doing domestic tasks. 
 
 In a phone interview, Arlie Hochschild, the author of The Outsourced Self and the foundational feminist text on women and housework, The Second Shift, makes the argument that a women’s desire for a clean home has deeper origins than just marketing. Cleaning, Hoschild says, is not simply physical work. It’s emotional work. “Letting the house go is in a way letting something deeper go. … You get a sense of safety in an orderly home,” Hochschild says. 
 
 But assuming both parties care about creating a sense of safety in the home, why does it fall to women? I suspect that women are more driven to keep a clean house because they know they—before their male partners—will be judged for having a dirty one. When I lived with two female roommates, I was much more of a slob. None of us was particularly responsible for the emotional tone of that apartment—no single one of us was more likely to be shunned for the state of our bathroom. But when I got married, the dust bunnies hopping across our floor started seeming like a personal affront. Although it was my husband’s father coming over, I was the one who insisted we clean. I was worried I would be judged for the beef jerky wrappers (on both aesthetic and gustatory grounds), despite the fact that my father-in-law has never once made a peep about the state of our abode. Somewhere lodged within me was the message that it was my responsibility. 
 
 Unfortunately, the notion that women will be the first to be judged for a messy home and the first to be commended for an orderly one isn’t much of an incentive for men to pick up a mop. In the instances in which men actually do the majority of the housework in their partnership, women are still the ones getting credit. David Michael Perez, the publisher and editor of Kindling Quarterly, says that though he does more decorating and cleaning than his spouse does, “often when people say ‘your house is nice,’ it’s directed more at my wife.” If they’re not even going to be rewarded for it, why bother at all? 
 
 With all these obstacles to real gender parity of chores, what’s a working woman to do? Philosophy professor Alexandra Bradner suggests on the Atlantic’s website that couples sit down with a list of questions like, “Do I do half of the laundry and half of the dishes every day?” to figure out where they’re slacking off in comparison to their mate. This sounds exhausting and impractical. If I do one load of laundry, it’s easier for me to do the second rather than wait for my husband to mosey over. (Bradner also says that when men do traditionally female chores, they’re enacting “‘small instances of gender heroism,’ or ‘SIGH’s”—which, barf.) 
 
 I’m much more inclined to take the advice of Jenny Anderson, the co-author of It’s Not You, It’s the Dishes, which applies economic theory to household tasks. A lot of women shoo their husbands away from cleaning because they know the men will do a sub-par job of scrubbing the sink. Anderson says you should divide up tasks according to the economic theory of comparative advantage. Let’s say a woman is twice as good as her husband at doing the laundry, but only 20 percent better than her husband at doing the dishes. In that couple, the husband should always do the dishes. What’s more, he’ll get better at it through repetition. 
 
 Another solution is for women to lower their filth thresholds. Did I really need to clean up the house for my father-in-law? Would he have cared if there were a few glasses sitting out on the kitchen table? Probably not. But it’s harder to stomach this fix once you have children, when the threat of a Fisher Price plastic hell-scape is perpetually around the corner. One of the women I interviewed for this piece, who doesn’t want to publicly shame her husband, said that when she came home after a weekday night out, it was so messy that it looked like she had 40 kids instead of two. If she had left the living room like that, it wouldn’t have been very good hygiene modeling for her kids (and, at some point, might get social services called). 
 
 One last suggestion comes from Magary, who so emphatically declared that cleaning sucks: make cleaning more fun. He says that when the Swiffer first came on the market, it was sort of enticing. (Swiffer reps said they had no information to share with me about men and cleaning.) “We like gadgets and stuff,” Magary explains. “If there was some new electronic hovering Apple product that cleaned the bathroom, I’d try it.” Are you listening out there in Cupertino? You have a huge, untapped market on your hands for toilet-scrubbing iPods. I bet my husband would buy one. ||||| One of the most pressing issues contributing to the persistence of gender inequality is the gendered division of domestic labour. Despite their entry into paid employment, women still carry out more domestic work than men, limiting their ability to act on an equal footing within the workplace. This qualitative research adds to the ongoing debate concerning the reasons for the persistence of the gendered nature of domestic work, by comparing working women who earn more, those who earn around the same and those who earn less than their male partners, as well as examining women’s absolute incomes. On average, men whose partners earn more than they do carry out more housework than other men, although women in these partnerships still do more. However, these women actively contest their male partner’s lack of input, simultaneously ‘doing’ and ‘undoing’ gender. The article also identifies class differences in the ‘sharing’ of domestic work. 
 
 The balance of the empirical evidence suggests that men do increase their domestic contribution when their female partners earn more than they do, although women still do more. In the following sections, evidence is presented on the reported division of domestic labour, drawing on UK qualitative data. 2 By focusing on the interactional level as a site for potential change ( Sullivan, 2004 ) and resistance ( Gatrell, 2005 ), the relative strength and potential interaction of both economistic and normative approaches to the explanation of the division of domestic labour are explored, as well as the impact of class. The various debates surrounding the ‘doing’ or ‘undoing’ of gender, gender deviance neutralization and autonomy theories are also evaluated in light of the research findings. Drawing on these approaches, we ask the following research questions: 
 
 The ‘doing gender’ argument has been debated and expanded upon in recent years, with Deutsch (2007) arguing that West and Zimmerman’s approach reinforced the inevitability of inequality, and that we need to shift the focus to how we can ‘undo’ gender (see also Butler, 2004 ). Sullivan’s 2011 critique of the ‘gender deviance neutralization’ or ‘compensatory gender display’ explanations for the persistence of inequalities in the division of domestic labour has stimulated further debate, with a greater focus on those women who earn more than their partners. Latest UK figures show that 31 per cent of working mothers are the main breadwinners in their households, up from 18 per cent in 1996/7 ( Ben Galim and Thompson, 2013 ). In light of these trends and, with rising female educational achievement and labour force participation, this proportion may increase even further. 
 
 On the other hand, Gupta and Ash (2008) argue that this curvilinear relationship is an artefact of the statistical techniques used and that a woman’s absolute (rather than relative) earnings are the major determinant of her housework hours. In other words, as a woman earns more, she does less housework: ‘her money, her time’ or the ‘autonomy hypothesis’ (see also Gupta, 2007 : 402). Gupta argues that both the economic dependence and gender display models of the relationship between earnings and housework are flawed, and goes on to suggest that married women have ‘a substantial degree of economic autonomy in the areas of domestic life for which they are normatively responsible’ ( Gupta, 2007 : 399 ) . However, Risman (2011) responds that ‘this does not mean that men are equally sharing household labour’ … and that what happens in practice is that women with higher incomes are more able to hire other women to do the ‘devalued feminized labour’ ( Risman, 2011 : 18). 
 
 Quantitative data analysis, on the other hand, has demonstrated that the more a woman earns, the more likely it is that her male partner will carry out domestic work, supporting the economistic model ( Coltrane, 2000 ; Harkness, 2008 ). In a UK quantitative study using data from various waves of the British Household Panel Survey (1993–2003), Kan (2008) found that women with more traditional attitudes to gender roles do more housework than other women. There was no evidence, however, that those women earning much more than their partners resort to a gender-traditional domestic division of labour. Earlier quantitative research from the United States, using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) from 1985 ( Brines, 1994 ) also suggests that in dual-earner households, men progressively do more housework and, as women’s relative contribution to household income increases, their hours of housework go down. However, using the Australian Time Use Survey data from 1992, Bittman et al. (2003) argued that, as women earn more than their partner, this model breaks down, men become economically dependent, but actually carry out less housework. Using a relative, rather than absolute measure of housework hours, Greenstein (2000) analysed the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH) data from 1987−88 and argued that both men and women neutralize their ‘deviant’ roles in housework: men do less and women do more. In other words, the relationship between women’s income contribution and their unpaid work hours is curvilinear. 
 
 A much later qualitative study of 30 married couples in the US, 1 however, is emphatic that ‘gender trumps money in the marital power equation…’ ( Tichenor, 2005 : 178). As in the earlier study, couples tended to conceal their gender-atypical household earnings pattern and downplay the wife’s economic contribution, while maintaining gender boundaries by emphasizing traditional gender roles. Rather than actively seeking gender egalitarianism, these couples focused their efforts on making their unusual marriages look and feel more comfortable and conventional. 
 
 If, as economistic arguments have suggested, men’s greater material contribution to the household relieves them of the responsibility for carrying out housework, then women who earn more than men should receive higher levels of input from their partners. In an early US qualitative study of WASP (wives as senior partners, earning more than their husbands) marriages, Atkinson and Boles (1984 : 864) found that both husbands and wives were aware that their partnerships were perceived as ‘deviant’, giving rise to social stress. This was minimized through ‘deviance neutralization techniques’. Wives made special efforts to be romantic and sexually attractive and husbands reciprocated by giving their wives emotional support and by doing more housework. Although the wives still did more housework than their husbands, Atkinson and Boles (1984 : 867) concluded that ‘…the WASP marital pattern can be seen as another step toward (gender) equality’. 
 
 The division of domestic labour between couples has been shown to vary by class. US research found that, although working-class men express more traditional views than middle-class men, they are more likely to engage in gender egalitarian activities ( Deutsch, 1999 ), partly because working-class couples are less able to afford domestic help ( Sullivan, 2004 ). Research from both the UK and the US has shown that the greatest change over time in sharing housework occurred in couples from lower occupational classes (e.g. Coltrane, 2000 ; Sullivan, 2006 ). Indeed, British and US time-use data from the 1970s to the early 2000s show that, by 2000−2001, men in couples with the lowest levels of educational attainment sometimes exceeded the contributions of men from higher occupational levels ( Sullivan, 2011 ). The mis-match between attitudes and behaviour within the home has been shown to reduce over time, with working-class men with working wives changing their attitudes and so reducing the variability between men of all classes ( Kroska and Elman, 2009 ). Attitudinal differences by class still exist, however, and Usdansky (2011) argues that the gap separating some working-class men’s (and women’s) attitudes from their behaviour results in ‘lived egalitarianism’. At the same time, the gap between some higher-class couples’ more egalitarian attitudes and less egalitarian behaviour results in ‘spoken egalitarianism’. These issues relating to occupational class will be discussed further when exploring the ‘sharing’ of domestic labour. 
 
 Feminist sociologists have long argued that the prevailing sexual division of domestic and caring work reflects the construction of masculinities and femininities and that domesticity is a central element in ‘doing gender’ ( West and Zimmerman, 1987 : 144). Gender is produced in everyday activities and household tasks and therefore household members ‘do’ gender as they carry out gender-differentiated housework and childcare ( Berk, 1985 ; Fenstermaker, 2002 ). Feminist authors, therefore, argue that the allocation of domestic work to women is constitutive of a deeply embedded set of cultural assumptions that have important (economic) consequences for women’s participation in market work (see also Fraser, 2000 ). These arguments suggest little room for change. In reality, the explanatory significance of relative resource and ‘doing gender’ approaches may be interactive, rather than mutually exclusive (see, for example, Pollert, 1996 ). 
 
 There has been a long-standing debate surrounding the persistent gender gap in household work. Early ‘economistic’ explanations suggested that the spouse who brings more resources to the partnership will have the power to get the other spouse to do more housework ( Becker, 1991 ; Blood and Wolfe, 1960 ). The ‘relative resource’ or ‘economic dependence’ argument is closely linked to time availability explanations, which suggest that carrying out domestic tasks is a function of the time available to both partners. As men spend more hours in market work than women, then women have more time to carry out domestic work. This suggests that, as women become ‘more like men’ and take up paid work, then men will become ‘more like women’ and undertake more domestic work. 
 
 Domestic work is of practical and symbolic significance and, if male partners do more, it may follow that employed women’s lives will improve considerably, allowing them to take on additional workplace responsibilities and compete on a more equal footing with men. The interactional level – at which the allocation of domestic tasks is largely worked out between partners – is an important site of potential change to both gender consciousness and practices ( Sullivan, 2004 ). It is also a site of resistance and contestation of the gender order, particularly by women ( Gatrell, 2005 ), but persistent conflict may also lead to a lack of accommodation and negotiation between partners. It has been argued that incremental changes in the division of domestic labour between partners (as opposed to major rapid or revolutionary change) can still effect a radical transformation over time ( Sullivan, 2011 ). The research presented here sets out to examine why women continue to do more housework than men, if and how this is changing, and whether or not male contributions to housework are differentiated by occupational class, as well as by relative and absolute earnings. Daily interactions between men and women in the UK are explored, drawing on qualitative data from women who earn more, women who earn around the same and those who earn less than their male partners. 
 
 Men have increased the amount of domestic work they do ( Kan et al., 2011 ) and spend more time with their children than before ( Coltrane, 2009 ). These changes may in part be due to the increased time pressures on working women, but may also reflect substantial changes in attitudes to gender roles. Evidence from the US and the UK suggests, however, that women continue to do more domestic work than men ( Bianchi et al., 2000 ; Kan et al., 2011 ). 
 
 Although women have been entering paid work in increasing numbers, contemporary employment continues to be constructed on a full-time ‘adult worker’ model ( Acker, 1990 ). Women’s continued responsibility for the majority of domestic work and childcare makes it difficult to meet ‘adult worker’ requirements and many women with such responsibilities scale down their employment intensity, working in a less challenging job, often on a part-time basis (e.g. Connolly and Gregory, 2008 ; Grant et al., 2005 ), even though such strategies are incompatible with career success (e.g. Thornley, 2007 ). 
 
 Interviews were normally conducted at the participant’s workplace in a private room, although some were conducted in participants’ homes. All interviewees were offered a gift voucher for participating. Interviews lasted around an hour, followed a semi-structured interview guide and were audiotaped and fully transcribed. The qualitative data were entered into NVivo, with both researchers involved in coding and data analysis to minimize bias, and thematic analysis was used to identify key themes emerging from the data. These were discussed and re-checked to ensure consistency and comprised: the ‘sharing’ of domestic labour, simultaneously doing and undoing gender, the myth of male incompetence ( Tichenor, 2005 ) and the impact of paid domestic help, which will be discussed in the following section. 
 
 Respondents were employed within four different occupational sectors: medicine, accountancy, finance and retail, and came from a variety of occupational levels. The female sample included 21 professional/managerial respondents, 11 intermediates and four routine/manual respondents, and the male sample included eight professional/managerials, one intermediate and three routine/manuals. 3 The sample, therefore, is biased towards professional and managerial employees, due to the selection of occupational sectors in the early stages of the research and the fact that many of the female respondents or female partners of respondents in lower-level occupations worked part-time. A definition of class based on occupational level is clearly not ideal but allowed us to explore some of the differences in household work between partners in couples from varied backgrounds. The inclusion of only full-time women also allowed for the analysis of a reasonable number of households in which the woman earned more than the man (Woman Earns More, or WEMs, using a relative measure of income) and earned a high salary (absolute income). In the female sample, there were 15 WEMs, 16 SINCs (Same Income Couples, using a relative measure) and 5 MEMs (Man Earns More, also using the relative measure). In the male sample, there was 1 WEM, 5 SINCs and 6 MEMs. 4 Of the 48 interviewees, only 12 of the female partners earned less than £30,000 per annum, and 15 earned £90,000 per annum or more. All of the professional/managerial male respondents were married to similarly-qualified women, and all the routine/manual men were married to similar women, except one intermediate man who was married to a routine/manual worker. 
 
 Semi-structured, face-to-face interviews were undertaken with 36 partnered women and 12 partnered men, all of whom had at least one child under the age of 14 (only one partner per couple was interviewed to minimize the potential for both partners being present at the same time, thereby limiting the ‘honesty’ of responses, although this means that the information gathered relies on one partner’s responses only). Only those households where women worked full-time (defined as 30 hours a week or more), and those with complete data on their own and their partners’ incomes, are included (in a small number of cases, male partners did not work or worked very few hours). In this way, arguments related to time availability are minimized (e.g. if the female partner is not working or is working part-time hours, she will have more hours to devote to domestic work). There are, however, differences in what constitutes ‘full-time’ hours, reflecting the existing differences in hours worked by women from different occupational classes within the UK labour market. 
 
 Results 
 
 The gendered division of domestic work: attitudes and behaviour It was not possible to systematically test if women’s housework hours increase (and men’s decrease) after a certain income point, in accordance with gender deviance neutralization theory, but it was possible to examine qualitatively which partner had the main responsibility for housework at the time of the interview, according to their absolute and relative incomes. Firstly, respondents were asked: ‘Who would you say has the major responsibility for housework/childcare, yourself or your partner?’ These questions were followed up with probes eliciting the daily management of domestic work and childcare, if they pay for any domestic work to be done and if they had discussed the allocation of domestic work and childcare with their partners before they had children. Subsequently we asked a series of attitudinal questions, including: ‘In your view, who should have primary responsibility for housework/childcare and other domestic responsibilities, the man or the woman?’ That is, attitudinal questions were deliberately asked after respondents described their behaviour. However, in this article, attitudes are described before actual behaviour.5 Respondents were overwhelmingly supportive of domestic sharing, reflecting the substantial shift in gender role attitudes that has taken place since the 1970s for both men and women (Crompton and Lyonette, 2008). Almost all women stated, irrespective of their relative and absolute income, that domestic chores should be shared, although many qualified their statements with reasoning that also reflected both relative resource and time availability explanations of the domestic division of labour. For example: I think it depends on what your paid working arrangements are. We divide them up according to how much time each of us has because of our outside-the-house responsibilities, and I’m very comfortable with what we do. (A1, female WEM, earning £90K; female responsibility for housework) Some women demonstrated relatively traditional gender role attitudes overall but nevertheless felt that if both partners were working, there should be a more equal distribution of housework: It should be a shared thing because if the woman is going out to work I think, you know, you’re paying money. I feel it should not be just for a lady to do. I mean if, for example, I’m staying at home, I’m not going to work and my husband is going out to work and he’s coming home tired, I’ll expect him to come and find a clean house, his dinner is ready and stuff like that for him. So I wouldn’t expect him to do that much, really. (Interviewer): But if you’re working, it should be shared? Equally shared, yes. (R11, female SINC, earning £23K; shared responsibility for housework) Men, too, reported almost unanimously that housework should be shared, with similar qualifications regarding time availability. Despite the widespread support for sharing, respondents’ behaviour tended to comply with more traditional patterns of domestic labour, however. Very few couples had discussed housework and childcare before having children, but many reported a more traditional division of labour after having children, partly as a result of women taking some time out of the labour market. Only one woman reported that her partner was mainly responsible for housework and none of the men said that they were mainly responsible. We deliberately set out to minimize ‘time availability’ explanations by focusing only on couples in which the woman works full-time. However, there were large differences in the hours worked, both between partners in couples, and also between the women in the study. Seventeen women worked 50 per cent or more of the total paid hours within their households: of these, 10 reported that the male partner shared the housework and one woman reported that her partner took the main responsibility (65 per cent of the women working more than 50 per cent of total paid hours). For those 29 women working less than 50 per cent of the total hours, only seven (24 per cent of the group) reported equal sharing (see Tables 1 and 2). These differences reflect some support for time availability explanations, although in 35 out of 46 couples with complete data (76 per cent of these couples), partners worked similar hours.6 In only seven cases, the woman worked 60 per cent or more of the total hours of paid employment and of these, five said that housework was shared or done mainly by the man. View this table: Download to PowerPoint Slide Table 1. Female partner’s absolute and relative income, absolute and relative working hours and main responsibilities for childcare and housework (female respondents). View this table: Download to PowerPoint Slide Table 2. Female partner’s absolute and relative income, absolute and relative working hours and main responsibilities for childcare and housework (male respondents). 
 
 Women’s relative and absolute incomes and the distribution of domestic work Of the 15 female WEMS, 10 reported that they had the main responsibility for housework (67 per cent), while four shared and one said that her partner did most. Similarly, 10 of the 16 female SINCs reported that they had the main responsibility (63 per cent), six said it was shared and none said their partner did most. Four of the five female MEMs reported that they had the main responsibility (80 per cent) and one said it was shared. Gender deviance neutralization theory suggests that gender differences should reduce as women earn a similar income to their partners and then re-emerge, with greater differences apparent between the women in the ‘SINC’ and the ‘WEM’ groups, as women begin to ‘display’ their gender. There is little to support this argument, however, as WEMs who earned substantially more than their partners (between 70 and 100 per cent of the couple’s total income) were in fact more likely to report that they shared housework with their partners and one woman, earning 72 per cent of the total income, reported that her partner took the main responsibility. The interviews also gave no indication that WEMs were assuming the major responsibility for housework in an effort to neutralize gender deviance. On the contrary, many were aware of gender issues around housework, and presented a heightened ‘gender consciousness’ (Sullivan, 2004: 208), sharpened by their enhanced material contribution to their households: I watched my mum … was a stay-at-home mum. She did all the housework. I was brought up, little girls run around with feather dusters, don’t they? … if I had a husband who refused to do housework or thought it was beneath him or had an attitude problem because I was earning too much money, I wouldn’t be married to him anymore, let’s put it that way. (F22, female WEM, earning £100K; female responsibility for housework) Indeed, among this group of interviewees, housework often represented a bone of contention, signifying the importance of challenges made at the interactional level, as highlighted by Sullivan (2004, 2011). In many cases efforts were being made to achieve a more gender-neutral division of domestic work, although some demonstrated greater success than others: I’ve made it known to my husband that, listen, I know you don’t like ironing but … it would help to just shove a wash load on so that at least I can come home and whatever … but I have hinted it would be nice to come home and not have to think about dinner every night, so we share, but I mean if you ask me who does the ironing, the hoovering, the majority, then I still do it … when my husband cleans he surface cleans, when I clean, I clean. (R1 female WEM, earning £45K; female responsibility for housework) A woman in a SINC household was making similar efforts: … (housework) should definitely be shared. I’m a definite advocate of it not being a woman’s job. My husband might be bad at it but I make him do it. I don’t have time to do everything. He’ll do the washing; he’s very good at getting the washing in the machine, getting it out, dry. I’ll do the dusting, the cleaning and the hoovering, because he’s awful at doing that. So, you know, we kind of split it. I don’t let him get away with it. (F20 female SINC, earning £38K; female responsibility for housework) Even the woman with the lowest relative income (20 per cent of the couple’s total income) and one of the lowest absolute incomes reported that housework should be shared, even though she went on to excuse her partner from not doing his share: It should be both equally (laughs). It’s just that it’s an individual thing, a man, he might be not as, not house-proud but things might not … matter to him as much. I know I’m very pedantic about things and I’m a bit of a perfectionist so I want things a certain way at home. So I know that he can have his meal and say oh well the dishes can be put in the dishwasher later or tomorrow. Whereas I’m like no, get them out of the way now, so it’s that sort of detail where, because I’m pedantic … and I think it sometimes comes to a head and you think well, no this is not fair, but then it’s me wanting it to be that way, so if that’s the case, I choose to do it that way. (R12, female MEM, earning £23K; female responsibility for housework) Based on these extracts, it may be suggested that the women, especially those earning the same or more than their partners, are simultaneously challenging or ‘undoing’ (Deutsch, 2007) as well as ‘doing’ gender. They are fully aware that their material contribution to the household should be fairly reflected in the sharing of housework, and are often frustrated at their lack of success in changing the situation. At the same time, their frustrations are to some extent mollified by the ‘myth of male incompetence’ (Tichenor, 2005: 41), echoing the previous respondent’s use of gender ‘essentialism’7 to excuse her partner: I tried to level it out but it didn’t work. He didn’t do it to the right standard. I think they do it on purpose, men, don’t they?… Using the cleaner, he’ll just clean round things, then all of a sudden you’ll move the sofa and you’re like, ‘What is that under there?’ … or he says, ‘Don’t clean upstairs now because no one goes up there bar us, you don’t need to hoover’ is his argument. (F30, female WEM, earning £33K; female responsibility for housework) Gupta (2007) argues that a woman’s absolute, rather than relative, income is a better predictor of her level of housework and therefore, lower-income women do more than higher-income women (see also Gupta and Ash, 2008). However, our data did not support this argument, as there appeared to be a pattern of those earning the highest incomes (£90K or more) and those with the lowest incomes (£23K or less) reporting a more equal sharing than women in the middle income groups. There was also no clear association between women’s absolute and relative income and male contribution to housework. The extent, form and success of women’s contestation to the gendered nature of domestic work demonstrated some interesting differences. Some have argued that higher-qualified women have higher expectations of equality and are more willing and able to engage in contesting the gender order (e.g. Crompton and Harris, 1999; Pesquera, 1997). However, the examples above suggest that women from all occupational levels expected equal sharing of domestic work with their male partners, with varying degrees of success.
– The world is becoming more egalitarian, with men doing a much larger share of things like cooking and childcare these days. "It’s seen as socially admirable and masculine for a man to be on diaper duty or to sous-vide a steak," writes Jessica Grose, whose own husband handles half the midnight baby feedings. "But there are no closet organizing tips in the pages of Esquire, no dishwasher detergent ads in the pages of GQ," and her husband hasn't scoured a single toilet during their six-year relationship. Cleaning, she writes for the New Republic, is the "final feminist frontier." She shares a few theories as to why (cleaning just isn't fun, laundry detergent is still marketed as a women's product) but ultimately posits that society's instinct is to blame the mess on the woman. "Unfortunately, the notion that women will be the first to be judged for a messy home and the first to be commended for an orderly one isn’t much of an incentive for men to pick up a mop," she writes. But in New York, Jonathan Chait sees something else at work: Women simply have higher cleanliness standards. The underlying assumption is "that there is a correct level of cleanliness in a heterosexual relationship, and that level is determined by the female. I think a little cultural relativism would improve the debate. My wife and I ... settled—fairly, I think—on a home that’s neater than I’d prefer to keep it, but less neat than she would." Click for Grose's full column or Chait's response.