Matthew Yglesias, discussing Lisa Belkin’s New York Times article on gendered task sharing, raises a perplexing issue
[T]he evidence from gay and lesbian couples does suggest that despite some specialization, you tend to get closer to 50-50 than heterosexuals do:
“Lesbian couples also have a more equal division of housework. Rothblum found that it is only heterosexual mothers who do the lion’s share of housework for the family each week  between 11 and 20 hours for her survey respondents. Lesbian parents, gay parents and heterosexual fathers all look the same on paper when it comes to cooking and cleaning  they all report doing between 6 and 10 hours a week.
Among other things, that result suggests a certain amount of “leveling down” in terms of housecleaning in gay couples with both partners acting more like a heterosexual man than like a straight woman.
I gotta say that’s been my first, second, and third-party experience as well. Anecdotally I’ve noticed a differential between the lesbian vs. straight moms at my children’s elementary school. I’ve also noticed that 6-10 hours a week estimate applies to non-romantic, non-parent male/male and female/female roommates too.
Point of reference though: even the difference between 6 hours and 10 hours is kind of huge. (Huge especially considering that just, say, just a one-plate difference in “time to do the dishes” tolerance means that the less tolerant person will wind up doing the dishes most of the time despite an on-paper fractional absolute “laziness” difference.)
If the number for partnered heterosexual women jumps from the same 6-10 to 11-20 hours per week while her partner’s doesn’t then unless someone’s really been drinking the “whistle while you work” cool-aid then conflict is going to seem inevitable.
So anyway, what’s going on that combined chores for same-sex parenting couples add up to 12-20 hours while opposite-sex couples run closer to 17-22? It can’t be as easy as “dads are deadbeats” because what would that make same-sex couples?
It could be as easy as “dads are patriarchal slave-drivers” who demand that their hetero spouses kick in an extra 5-10 hours a week more than they would for a same-sex spouse. It could be that same-sex partners tend to live in smaller houses, or condos or apartments and so there’s just less work overall. It could be that decades of indoctrination with Barbies and E.Z. Bake Ovens, plus maybe Martha Stewart’s “good things” mentality, holds hetero women to higher (possibly self-imposed) standards than their gay or lesbian counterparts. It could be that compared to gay men and lesbian women straight men start generating a lot more tasks that they then refuse to take responsibility for. It could be this or it could be that but while there’s no question that there’s something going on, I don’t know what it is, and even after years and years of discussion I still haven’t heard of a non-guess/non-theory explanation.
And by the way speculation like this doesn’t help either.
[O]ne parent  almost always the wife  has parenting or housekeeping standards that the other cannot (or will not) meet. Dad dresses the children wrong and diapers them wrong and sends inadequate thank-you notes and leaves the house a mess. This may look like a cranky power struggle, Deutsch [Francine M. Deutsch, a psychology professor at Mount Holyoke and the author of “Halving It All: How Equally Shared Parenting Works.” —fl] says, but the dynamic, which sociologists call “gatekeeping,” also reflects social pressures.
Women, she says, know that the world is watching and judging. If the toddler’s clothes don’t match, if the thank-you notes don’t get written, if the house is a shambles, it is seen as her fault, making her overly invested in the outcome. Many women will also admit to the frisson of superiority, of a particular form of gratification, when they are the more competent parent, the one who can better soothe the tears in the middle of the night.
But that doesn’t particularly make sense given that you’d expect lesbian parents to both be affected if it was external judgment or a matter of one-upping each other, and if that was it you’d expect to see a bigger disparity between chores done in lesbian households compared to gay households.
So…?
