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Men who do housework may get more sex
(scotz & gg)
By DAVID CRARY,AP National Writer
NEW YORK - American men still don't pull their weightwhen it comes to housework and child care, butcollectively they're not the slackers they used to be.The average dad has gradually been getting betterabout picking himself up off the sofa and pitching in,according to a new report in which a psychologistsuggests the payoff for doing more chores could bemore sex. The report, released Thursday by the Council onContemporary Families, summarizes several recentstudies on family dynamics. One found that men'scontribution to housework had doubled over the pastfour decades; another found they tripled the timespent on child care over that span. "More couples are sharing family tasks than everbefore, and the movement toward sharing has beenespecially significant for full-time dual-earnercouples," the report says. "Men and women may not befully equal yet, but the rules of the game have beenprofoundly and irreversibly changed." Some couples have forged partnerships they considerfully equitable. "We'll both talk about how we're so lucky to havesomeone who does more than their share," said MaryMelchoir, a Washington-based fundraiser for theNational Organization for Women, who — like her lawyerhusband — works full-time while raising 6-year-oldtriplets. "He's the one who makes breakfast and folds thelaundry," said Melchoir, 47. "I'm the one who fixesthings around the house." Joshua Coleman, a San Francisco-area psychologist andauthor of "The Lazy Husband: How to Get Men to Do MoreParenting and Housework," said equitable sharing ofhousework can lead to a happier marriage and morefrequent sex. "If a guy does housework, it looks to the woman likehe really cares about her — he's not treating her likea servant," said Coleman, who is affiliated with theCouncil on Contemporary Families. "And if a womanfeels stressed out because the house is a mess and theguy's sitting on the couch while she's vacuuming,that's not going to put her in the mood." The report's co-authors, sociologists Scott Coltraneof the University of California, Riverside and OrielSullivan of Ben Gurion University, said they wereaddressing a perception that women's gains in theworkplace were not being matched by gains at home. "The typical punch line of many news stories has beenthat even though women are working longer hours on thejob and cutting back their own housework, men are notpicking up the slack," Coltrane and Sullivan wrote. They said this perception was based on unrealisticexpectations and underestimated the degree of change"going on behind the scenes" since the 1960s. Thechange, they said, "is too great a break from the pastto be dismissed as a slow and grudging evolution." Among the findings they cited: _In the U.S., time-use diary studies show that sincethe '60s, men's contribution to housework doubled fromabout 15 percent to more than 30 percent of the total.Over the same period, the average working motherreduced her weekly housework load by two hours. _Between 1965 and 2003, men tripled the amount of timethey spent on child care. During the same period,women also increased the time spent with theirchildren, suggesting mutual interest in a morehands-on approach to child-raising. Sullivan and Coltrane predict men's contributions willincrease further as more women take jobs. "Men share more family work if their female partnersare employed more hours, earn more money and havespent more years in education," they said. Pamela Smock, a University of Michigan sociologist whoalso works with the council, said a persistent gendergap remains for what she called "invisible" householdwork — scheduling children's medical appointments,buying the gifts they take to birthday parties,arranging holiday gatherings, for example. Marriage equality is more elusive among blacks thanwhites, with black women shouldering a relativelyhigher burden in terms of child care and housework,said council collaborator Shirley Hill, a sociologyprofessor at the University of Kansas. The report's overall findings meshed with what CarolEvans, founder and CEO of Working Mother magazine, hasbeen observing as she tracks America's two-incomecouples. "There's a generational shift that's quite strong,"she said. "The younger set of dads have their ownexpectations about themselves as to being helpful andparticipatory. They haven't quite gotten to equalityin any sense that a women would say, 'Wow, that'sequal,' but they've gotten so much farther down the road."
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