Professor Melissa Milkie spoke to CNN about gender and household work. As women contribute to household income more than ever before, they are still also doing the majority of the unpaid domestic work. According to Professor Milkie, although both men and women are working more paid hours than previous generations, women are also contributing many more hours of unpaid, domestic work to their households and have fewer leisure hours.
Professor Milkie is a professor of sociology with teaching duties at the UTM campus, and chair of the Graduate Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on culture, gender and family, health, and the intersections between work and family. Her work has been published in academic journals such as Social Forces, Society and Mental Health and the American Sociological Review.
The full article can be viewed here. We have posted an excerpt below.
Younger women are working longer hours and earning more than ever before. But they're still carrying more of the burden at home.
While millennial households are more likely to adopt egalitarian views about gender, reporting they want to split household duties and income equally, research shows those promises often collapse under the weight of long-held gender stereotypes.
On an average day, 19% of men reported doing housework like laundry, cleaning and other tasks, compared to 49% of women. Women also spend more time every day doing these tasks, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics...
...Yet as women contribute more to household income, they're still also doing the majority of the unpaid domestic work. Some researchers have pointed to this as a "stall" in the gender revolution, says Melissa Milkie, professor of sociology at the University of Toronto.
"When we talk about things like the wage gap, it's often not linked to what's happening in the home, and I think it needs to be, because of that unpaid labor that's really a central part of people's work-life balancing," Milkie says. "With women, the cost is borne in their career or their wages when they're doing more in the home."
Young adult men are working slightly more, too. But men also spend more time than women exercising, playing games and enjoying other leisure activities, according to the US Department of Labor.