Note To Men: Housework Is Not Rewarded With Sex

Forget what your wife told you. Researchers at the University of Washington have done the science, and the conclusion is that couples who follow traditional gender roles around the house – wives doing the cooking, cleaning and shopping; men doing yard work, paying bills and auto maintenance – have more sex than those who don’t. And now the numbers: Men and women reported having sex about five times, on average, in the month prior to the survey, but marriages in which the wife does all the traditionally female tasks  reported having had sex about 1.6 times more per month than those where the husband does all the traditionally female chores. A U of Washington news release reports on the finding, which contradicts the conclusions of several earlier studies, and is based on a national survey of about 4,500 heterosexual U.S. couples participating in the National Survey of Families and Households. The data is old, collected from 1992 to 1994, but the researchers argue that attitudes and sex drive haven’t changed. The study found that husbands, average age 46, and wives, average age 44, spent a combined 34 hours a week on traditionally female chores. Couples spent an additional 17 hours a week on chores usually thought of as men’s work. Husbands performed about one-fifth of traditionally female tasks and a little more than half of the male-type work. That’s right: wives help out with men’s chores more often than husbands help with female tasks. Read the study here.