Want to know why women will never be equal? They’re obsessed with cleaning!

It’s an incendiary view from a male author — but what on earth does his wife have to say about it?

HE’S the author of a new book that claims to scrutinise the gender roles of the modern-day marriage and re-evaluate the distributions of labour.

In short, in The Unmade Bed, dr Stephen Marche, a 40-year-old novelist and magazine columnist, seeks to determine whose job it is to clean the bogs and basins now women often work as long hours as men.

Not surprisingly, dr Marche’s premise has already ruffled quite a few feathers.

For he argues that, far from doing more around the house, men shouldn’t lift a finger. But neither, he insists, should women. Housework, he maintains, is a pointless pursuit.

But before you down tools, read on to discover what his wife, Sarah Fulford, 41, a high-flying magazine editor, has to say.

The war over housework is perhaps not quite over yet . . .

STEPHEN SAYS . . .

THE last time my wife Sarah and I argued about housework was a couple of weeks ago, when I got up early and started to unload the dishwasher.

at least I was doing some housework — but, according to her, I was doing it all wrong.

The clattering of pans and dishes woke her up, and she berated me for being too noisy.

Though we argue less now, bickering over the chores has been a feature of our relationship since we moved in together 20 years ago.

It only got worse when we had children — our son is now 11 and our daughter four.

But we’re not unusual. These sorts of ‘chore wars’ are common among nearly every couple I know.

Like most women, Sarah prefers the house to be more orderly: swept floors and organised shelves in the kitchen.

She will notice a thick line of dust across the books and whether the appliances on the kitchen counter are in the correct position.

She can’t understand how I can relax watching sport while the living room is untidy. The result is that she’s always done more housework.

For me, these things pass me by. Well, perhaps not completely. I notice a messy room, but I don’t care.

I could leave my desk, tidy the stairs and wash up the lunch dishes. I could even paint the bathroom ceiling, which is damp-stained. But I won’t do any of those things.

The fact that I will have to do some of them at some point is oppressive. Indeed, even writing down the list of chores I have done, I feel slightly emasculated.

BECaUSE housework is dreary and, in my view, a clean house is the sign of a wasted life, truly. Sarah and I have bickered over it time and time again, but my argument is we should all be doing less.

Fifty years ago, it was perfectly normal to iron sheets and polish the silverware.

I remember my own mother — who was a high-flying obstetrician and gynaecologist — being expected to ‘sweep the parlour’ every night.

For years, women have been trying to educate men to be more domesticated. It’s failed.

Caring less about whether the curtains are clean or the windows are spotless is the only way women will reach equality in the home.

Because statistics show that men do no more housework than we did 40 years ago.

We are spending three times as much time with our children as we did in the Seventies, and if ‘housework’ consists of picking the children up from school, helping with homework and ferrying them to classes, many of us are doing our fair share.

In any case, I don’t believe women particularly respect men who do more domestic duties.

Research has found that men who do housework have less sex than men who don’t, while men who do traditional male ‘work around the house’, the more physical heavy-lifting work, have more sex than men who don’t.

So, while you may not find me picking up socks or doing the laundry, I’m happy to be out on our garden path shovelling off 2 ft of snow.

Since 2000, sociologists have identified a trend of declining unpaid domestic labour around the home.

When my daughter is old enough, hopefully her generation will care even less about a layer of dust on the furniture or fluff on the carpet.

Housework is perhaps the only political problem in which doing less and not caring are the solution. The fact that women are learning to care less can only be a good thing. Eventually — hopefully — we’ll all be living in perfect egalitarian squalor.

SARAH SAYS . . .

THERE are some days when I come home exhausted from a ten-hour day at the office to find dirty dishes and pans in the sink that Stephen used earlier in the day to make lunch.

The house will be in chaos, the floors are unswept, and he has an irritating habit of bringing four or five sweaters from upstairs and leaving them in piles around the house in case he gets cold. There was a time when I might have snapped. We’d have a stand-off, itemising all the domestic jobs we’d done that week.

‘I cleaned this yesterday!’ . . . ‘I washed the dishes the day before’ . . . and so on.

It’s a conversation we had many times throughout our 20s and early 30s.

I still find it frustrating that Stephen simply can’t see the mess. He argues that, if you have a busy career, why spend your free time doing boring tasks such as laundry?

I can see his point. Yet, still, I used to wonder why his socks can’t find their way into the laundry basket. Why can’t he see that the floor needs sweeping?

It’s been a disappointment to professional women like me that when we attained the status and power men enjoyed in the Fifties, we didn’t get a ‘wife’ into the package.

Everything would be so much easier if there was someone in my marriage to take care of all the boring domestic stuff.

When our daughter was a toddler, we had a full-time nanny and the house was always tidy. It was terrific.

TodaY, Stephen and I hire a cleaner for three hours a week — and I couldn’t live without her.

She cleans the bathroom, washes the kitchen floor, folds the laundry and the whole house looks put together and tidy. Those are happy days for me.

Because I admit I do like the house to be clean and tidy. Creating a warm home can be an act of love.

of course, chores are boring, but a clean house is relaxing and feels good.

So, what do I do today when I find those pots and pans in the sink? I bite my tongue, turn on the hot water and clean them.

Because I’ve come to realise that life is too short and that, actually, my husband is doing housework. It may not be the definition of traditional housework that many people have — cleaning, vacuuming, tidying — but instead, it’s doing homework with the children.

It’s making their packed lunches for school.

It’s being the parent who has to drop everything at a moment’s notice if school calls and one of our children is sick.

Because I never help with homework. I’m better at washing the dishes.