Introduction

In August 2011, Time magazine published a story entitled “Chore wars” (Konigsberg, 2011), accompanied by a splashy front-page graphic, which drew attention to the amount of housework that women and men in the U.S. perform. When considering both paid labor (that is, men's and women's market work) and unpaid labor (nonmarket work, principally housework), the story found that women and men had relatively similar amounts of total work time. This distinction—that is, examining combined paid and unpaid labor hours as opposed to unpaid labor only—was lost on readers and, judging by the online comments responding to the story, was instead met with wide skepticism in the U.S. The story flew in the face of conventional wisdom: that housework is women's work and that while men are doing more than in the past, the burden of housework continues to fall to women. More importantly to readers, the story did not reflect their own lives. Average couples may be more equal in their (house) work time but readers were not average. Women lamented how much work they performed, and men were either silent or noted that their wife did the housework.

From our perspective, this cover story was interesting not due to the author's use of her own experiences of a changed division of paid and unpaid labor over time (which made for an interesting read in the popular press), but because of the sociological research cited throughout the story that explained the social factors in the U.S. that had underpinned women's increased labor-market participation and men's increases in housework (particularly in childcare). Indeed, much of the discussion in the article was around parents and childcare rather than the tasks that are connected to cooking, cleaning, and laundry, where evidence notes true disparities lie. However, the print, broadcast, and online media responses to discussions around housework gave us pause. As scholars who have studied housework for decades, we believed that the public discussions were reflections of the private struggles over the changing responsibilities that women and men have in contributing to the household.