WFH means husbands ‘do fewer chores’

Husbands slack off on chores when their wives are working from home, a study has found. Women do more of the jobs around the house when both people work remotely, data show, and men only pick up their work rate when their wife goes to the office. Scientists found both partners in a marriage do more household tasks when they have flexible working schedules. However, husbands were found to do fewer chores on days when their wife worked from home.

HUSBANDS slack off on chores when their wives are working from home, a study has found.

Women do more of the jobs around the house when both people are working remotely, data show, and men only pick up their work rate when their wife goes to the office.

Scientists found that both partners in a marriage do more household tasks when they have flexible working schedules compared to when they go into the office every day.

However, husbands were found to do fewer chores on days when their wife worked from home compared to when she was working in the office.

Women, however, did just as much housework, irrespective of where their husband was working on any given day.

Two studies during the pandemic saw 165 Chinese couples and 57 Korean pairs fill in a daily log of how much household work they had done and what their work day looked like. “The two studies provide converging results that working from home [vs the office] increased employees’ family task completion for both husbands and wives and that wives working from home (vs the office) decreased husbands’ family task completion,” the scientists write in their study, published in the journal Personnel Psychology.

“We found that men and women don’t have the same experience working from home,” explained Jasmine Hu, lead author of the study and professor of management at the Ohio State University. “There are still some gendered differences in how they manage their job and family responsibilities.”

The findings also revealed that, when a husband was working from home, wives completed more domestic duties, when they were also working from home compared to when they were in the office.

When women were unable to work from home and had to go into work every day, it was seen that men then did pick up the slack and did more chores. The issue is not an inability of men to do the tasks, but that men inexplicably opted not to do as much work when their wives were also at home with them, leaving the women to shoulder more of the burden.

“These findings suggest that husbands could help remote-working wives when they have more flexible work schedules and do more family tasks when their wives have more rigid work schedules,” Prof Hu said.

The study also found signs that when a husband and wife are both working from home together it leads to conflict.

Arguments occurred over who was pulling their weight and employees also felt guilty that because they were spending work hours doing chores, they were less engaged in their work.

“Managers should form realistic expectations about how much work their remote-working employees can handle and show more understanding of the home working situations of dualearner couples,” Prof Hu said.