Can mothers ever catch a break? A new study published in the journal Work, Employment and Society, suggests they don’t in real life. Conducted by researchers at the UK-based University of Bath School of Management, the study shows that data collected over an 18-year period proves that as the gender pay gap closed, the gender housework gap increased—meaning, as working mothers out-earned their husbands, they also earned more housework while at home.
The study looked at 6,643 dual-earning heterosexual couples from 1999 to 2017, and focused exclusively on how parenting can affect household roles. The data was gathered by the Institute of Family Studies, and lead author Joanna Syrda says their findings were astonishing, to say the least.
The researchers found that while childless couples did not see any shift in their division of housework irrespective of how much each partner earned, couples with children had a very different experience. The more money the working moms made, the more housework they ended up with—mostly due to what Syrda is calling a “traditionalising effect” among specifically married parents, and not cohabiting parents. In numbers, a mother’s housework hours reduced from 18 hours to 14 hours per week on average when she started working. The moment her salary surpassed the father’s salary, however, the housework hours per week increased once again to 16 hours. On the other hand, husbands did an average of six to eight hours of housework every week when they out-earned their wives, and the hours dropped the moment the earning gap went the other way
“While parenthood could theoretically incentivise a more efficient division of labour, I find it has a traditionalising effect and parents’ housework exhibits significant gender deviance neutralization while housework division of childless couples is independent of relative income,” Syrda told the Washington Post.
“We see these top female earners as compensating in doing more housework,” she added, “not when women out-earn their husbands but when mothers out-earn fathers. So parenthood seems to have that traditionalising effect.”
It’s important to note that this study ended in 2017, before the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted and exacerbated the gender housework gap—and its immense impact on working mothers.