Arts & Entertainment
New Book Explores Why Some Women Do Twice as Much Housework as Their Husbands
For Corinne Low, being a lesbian is an “evidence-based” decision.
She’s only kind of kidding — because here’s her evidence: Women in heterosexual marriages who are the primary breadwinners do almost twice as much cooking and cleaning as their male spouses.
“Gender roles have converged in the workplace,” Low said. “They haven’t converged in the home.”
In her book “Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours,” Low details how she went through this as well — and how women can break out of the statistics.
Part of what’s driving this disparity is the invisible labor done by women, Low said. Men “try to do half of the tasks that they’re aware of,” she said.
Low offered this as an example of invisible labor: While a husband may have dropped his kids off at school, he might not have realized that the wife needed to pack lunches, dress the kids in seasonally appropriate clothes and set up after-school care.
Low made the choice to eliminate men from her dating pool. But for those who don’t have that option, she still has hope for those in heterosexual partnerships.
She suggests treating dating like interviewing for the position of a co-CEO and not someone who’s just a boyfriend: “It matters a little bit less who we like going to movies with, and over the course of our lives, it matters who does your laundry, what do you like to cook and what games you want to play with our kids.”
Read an excerpt from the book below:
If you weren’t so busy or tired, what would you spend your time doing? Is it being outside? Moving? Seeing a close friend? Reading?
As a group, women are very good at “making it work.” Human beings are naturally adaptable creatures, but women—we are great at coping. When faced with hard things, we try harder. Here’s the thing: Women can’t bend anymore without breaking. We can’t tweak or life hack our way to more hours in the day or around the major structural issue that’s making our lives impossible: that there is simply no way to juggle a fifty-to eighty-hour career with full-time housework and—for those of us who are mothers—parenting load.
We need to make the time we have more meaningful and to make more time for ourselves in the first place.
There are three ways we’re going to do that. The first is by flipping the script on how our automatic choices often undermine us, by “paying yourself first” in leisure time. The second is going to be by substituting money for time or finding other creative solutions. And the third, and arguably least fun: making hard choices.
Pay yourself first is a personal finance adage that refers to putting money into savings or investments before you do the rest of your budgeting. We can take a similar view of time. If it’s not immediately removed from our budget (in this case, our calendar or schedule), it can all too easily slip through our fingers. Leisure time must be accounted for in advance and treated as a sacred obligation, just like a meeting with your boss, instead of the “treat” you’re allowed to have if you got through your entire to-do list.
Now that we’re thinking about time as something that you can either pay to yourself, to spend on utility, or spend on something else, I want to extend this idea to housework. We’re comfortable hiring a handyman or a gardener, but when it comes to female-coded tasks like cooking, cleaning, and childcare, we suddenly feel like there is no budget to hire someone What can you spend from your budget on making your life easier? If you can, find the tasks in your day that don’t absolutely require you to do them, and find a way to outsource them.
And if outsourcing labor is not economically realistic, can you trade tasks with friends, create car pools, or just invest in simplifying your life socertain things don’t need to happen? Or can you and a friend have your catch-ups while alternating whose kitchen you clean? This way, home production work becomes partially leisure time.
Lastly, I want you to have some tough conversations with yourself. We need to ask: If it’s not worth hiring someone to help with it, is it worth being done at all? Just because other people are doing something doesn’t mean that it’s right for you.I’m sure all your choices make sense on the surface. But for every use of your time that has some benefit, you’re giving something up to have it.
The cost for any use of your time is what you could have had instead. Peace? Relaxation? Time with your family? Better mental health? The question isn’t whether you’re doing something worthwhile with your time—of course you are. The question is, is this the best way to use that time?
You need to be ruthless in protecting your time from things that are not investments in your future and do not bring you joy. I think of it as Marie Kondo, but for your time. Part of that process means accepting that you’re not supposed to be perfect. Hold on to things that give you pleasure, both to do and to have done. Cook if you enjoy cooking, and use shortcuts if you need everyone to eat but you don’t enjoy it. Garden and keep houseplants if you enjoy taking care of them. If the sight of their decaying leaves just makes you feel guilty? Toss ’em.
Success is you enjoying your life and filling it with the things you value. So if watering your metaphorical houseplants, fertilizing them, and trimming their brown leaves isn’t part of how you produce utility? Throw them away – and maybe read a good book instead.
Excerpted from the book Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours by Corinne Low. Copyright © 2025 by Corinne Low. Reprinted with permission of Flatiron Books. All rights reserved.
Contact Blair Paddock: @blairpaddock.bsky.social | [email protected]
