Via Kay Steiger, I doubt anyone will be shocked to learn that moms do more unpaid work and dads do more market labor, but the trends are interesting. One particularly fascinating finding is that if you look at 1965, moms and dads were doing 12.5 combined hours of child care. By 2011, dads were doing seven hours of child care—more than half. Except rather than reduce their level of child care in response to dads doing more, moms now do … more child care than ever.
Men have done less to step up their commitment to housework, but there’s been more progress toward equalization on this front because women have dramatically scaled back their housework. The upshot is that American houses are probably a bit messier than they were in 1965, and we perhaps are importing more maids from Latin America.
