Couples who share housework often divorce

You can’t keep a modern woman in a marriage just by doing the laundry, a new study has found.

Couples who shared housework equally were also more likely to divorce, according to the findings of the Norwegian Institute for Social Research.

“This doesn’t mean gender equality leads to divorce,” cautioned coauthor Thomas Hansen.

“Modern couples are modern in different ways,” Hansen told the Star. “Modern women can more easily exit a bad marriage if they have higher education and more income.”

Less traditional couples might also have a more liberal attitude toward divorce, he said.

The study examined nine major aspects of how the division of housework and child care affect marriages, reflect attitudes and change as couples age.

The divorce findings, he said, were small but statistically significant: it involved only 3 to 4 per cent of the 8,000 couples surveyed, but the rate of breakup was 60 per cent.

Nor was it the only surprising finding, said Hansen.

Satisfaction with their marriage was highest in couples in which the women did much of (but not most or all) of the housework. Which would seem to be a good thing, because the survey found that women do much of (but not most or all) of the housework in more than 70 per cent of the households.

That didn’t work for child care: only when men did half the child care did men and women say they were most satisfied. “Men love that women do most of the housework but they don’t like women to do the most child care,” he said.

“That makes a lot of sense to me, coming from Oslo. There is an increasing stigma in not doing your share of child care and there is a social reward attached to that role,” Hansen said.

Researchers found that couples in their 20s tend to share housework equally but move to a more traditional system when kids arrive.

That traditional pattern persists when the kids move out.

The study also found men in their 20s tend to hold a slightly less positive attitude toward gender quality and housework.