Fathers Day: Research says dads do their share of housework

Google “housework women men,” or anything similar, and you’ll be bombarded with dozens of headlines telling you fathers aren’t doing enough.But liberal media bias aside, if we take a closer look, what the research actually shows is that fathers do as much for their families as mothers do.In 2020, the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research (ISR), the world’s largest academic survey and research organization, cited data showing that men contribute as many hours of work to their families as women do, and have for at least the past five decades.

The Pew Research Center even found “fathers’ overall work time (including unpaid work at home) is actually two hours more than that of mothers.”How do we square research with perception? Women’s advocates and sympathetic media focus not on overall contributions to a household, which includes housework, childcare and market work (paid employment), but specifically on housework and/or childcare.The greater burden that men bear as family breadwinners — a burden that remains, even when women are working full-time jobs — is downplayed, when not ignored entirely. Mothers are full-time homemakers in over a quarter of families with children, and are four times as likely to work part-time as employed fathers are.

Mothers work full-time in 46% of two-parent families.Given those statistics, the gender dynamic in work between mothers and fathers is simple, and exactly what one would think: The more hours one parent works in the market, the less they work at home, and vice versa.According to Pew, “parenting and household responsibilities are shared more equally when both the mother and the father work full time than when the father is employed full time and the mother is employed part time or not employed.”Yes, even when mothers and fathers are both working full-time, mothers are still doing more domestic labor than fathers.

But even when mothers are employed full-time in the market, fathers still ...