Longest Running Household Chore Study Short-changes Single Parent Homeowners

Photo by Flickr user bizryter. Used under a Creative Commons license.

This post is about household chores and a long-running study thereof. There is no doubt on earth that worldwide, and here in almost all of "developed countries," women are saddled with far more domestic tasks than men are. There's also no doubt that the balance is substantially, but not completely, reversed in my household. The study makes it look like I do *even more* than my partner, though, and I think that's a problem.

if the study came out only once I'd just ignore it. They publish the same old new results every one or two years. This, however, will be a one-time rant.

So Dana Goldstein of TAPPED draws a reasonable conclusion from the data she's got to work with...

A new study from the University of Michigan finds that among hetero couples, men create for their female partners an extra seven hours per week of housework, while their own chore burden decreases by an hour per week when they live with a partner.

She said it here.

and then concludes, again not necessarily unreasonably from the data she's got to work with...

it's no wonder that more and more women are choosing to raise kids on their own. A male partner can be a real burden! Over a third of all American households are now single-parent families, the vast majority of them headed by a woman.

The data source she relies on sounds pretty impeccable

Conducted since 1968 by the university's Institute for Social Research, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). It's a long-term, nationally representative study that collects data on the economic, health and social behavior of the same, nearly 8,000 U.S. families year after year.

"The PSID is the only instrument that lets us look at income mobility, people moving in and out of poverty, across three generations," says Dan Newlon, project manager for NSF. "The data allows us to look at the mid- to long-term socioeconomics of household dynamics."

Source: National Institute of Health

Woah, three generations! 8,000 families! An "instrument!" Since 1968! It *must* be true!

The problem is the information, which Goldstein and an awful lot of other people have been drawing on for decades is a little weird. One thing you *can't* say about the study is that it was designed by 1968-era radical feminists. They firmly divide household adults into "Head" and "Wife." And according to their FAQ (italics mine.)

How is Head defined in the PSID?

Within each wave of data, each FU (family unit) has one and only one current Head. Originally, if the family contained a husband-wife pair, the husband was arbitrarily designated the Head to conform with Census Bureau definitions in effect at the time the study began.

Source: PSID Frequently Asked Questions

Eh, if the Census Bureau says so it must be ok. Ok, not, but...

The person designated as Head may change over time as a result of other changes affecting the family. When a new Head must be chosen (see conditions for selecting a new Head below), the following rules apply:

Good, at least they're flexible about this -- no doubt due to years of feminism's influence...

The Head of the FU must be at least 16 years old and the person with the most financial responsibility for the FU. If this person is female and she has a husband in the FU, then he is designated as Head.

Uh, well, that still doesn't sound very egalitarian. And what about households where the woman isn't married?

If she has a boyfriend with whom she has been living for at least one year, then he is Head. However, if the husband or boyfriend is incapacitated and unable to fulfill the functions of Head, then the FU will have a female Head.

Woah! Her boyfriend moves in with all his belongings in two Hefty™ bags and kaboom, if he can keep the couch warm for a year he gets a big promotion!

There is a *little* bit of leeway designed into the study though

Who are the Husbands of Heads?

Husbands of Heads are usually living in the family unit, although they can be living in institutions as well. They are usually disabled, although in a few cases, the female half of the pair insists on being the Head.

"...the female half of the pair insists on being the head." Well that's just mighty progressive of them to humor those liddle ladies like that.

Anyway, I mock the designers of the program so bitterly in large part to immunize critics against the charges it's some kind of Limbaugh-nightmare "feminazi" agendas. They're, um, pretty clearly not.

But does that mean their data is valid? Well, you'd want to define valid. If you mean rigorously gathered and cross-tabulated to be latitudinally and longitudinally consistent then yeah, it's pretty darn valid. Unfortunately if by valid you mean "accurately reflects chores completed around the home by any, let alone all 'Heads' and 'Wives'" then no.

For one thing the study reports on only "core" chores, where "core" is defined as

According to the study, housework was defined as "core chores," or routine housework that people generally do not enjoy doing such as washing dishes, laundry, vacuuming floors and dusting.

"Routine housework, like cooking dinner or making beds, was captured in diaries, the primary tool used for the study of time allocation," says Stafford. Researchers supplemented the diaries with data from questionnaires asking both men and women to recall how much time they spent on basic chores in an average week.

Other activities such as home repairs, mowing the lawn, and shoveling snow were not in the study. "Items such as gardening are usually viewed as more enjoyable; the focus here is on core housework," says Stafford.

Source: the article from NIS cited above

Ok, I'm going to extend a tiny amount of good will towards the study-designers way and say that by excluding outdoor activities the study automatically controls for differences between families living in apartments, houses, and farms. But then I'm going to withdraw it because for non-apartment dwellers it badly distorts the data.

• Consider Dana Goldstein's case that women are increasingly choosing single-parent status. By excluding outdoor chores the study would measure no change in hours when a single parent moved her children from an apartment into a house. Yet we know the workload increases substantially. (If she moves instead to a farm where, for instance, she might also have to chop or haul firewood the "off the books" imbalance would become even larger.)
• Furthermore, an unscrupulous MRA might advocate that his fellows could pick up a two-hour shift in *measured* tasks by swapping an hour's worth of weekly mowing and edging (doesn't count) for an hours worth of laundry (does count.)

Both of which I think we can all agree would be bullshit. As is, therefore much of the analytical value of the study itself.** Which, when you think about it, isn't *that* surprising for a program that was designed, by economists rather than anthropologists or feminists, during the Lyndon Johnson administration, and just before the whole myth of the Ozzie and Harriet nuclear family began to collapse.

Anyway, I don't doubt the overall perception that women do more housework. For me personally it's a shame about that study. By their reasoning I do a *huge* amount of the "core chores" and my partner often mows the lawn. Therefore the methodology makes me look like I do... *even more* housework than I do! So too bad for me but its *still* bullshit.

[** Much of the value, that is, but not all. As a note in one of the program's own analysis of their methodology says, while the data collected itself might be suspect the study overall does a good job of measuring relative *changes* in... whatever it is exactly they're measuring. --fl]