SURVEY: How working parents share the load at home
A recent Pew Research study on how couples share the responsibility of running a household reveals a different set of perceptions on how men and women share those duties.
The findings — based on a survey of 1,807 adults in September and October — show that mothers are more likely to perceive an uneven division of labor at home. Mothers think they do more around the house; fathers think they help more around the house. Mothers also feel, more so than men, that being a parent has held them back from advancing at work,
So how do they compare?
BizWomen.com compiled a summary of findings from the survey, which was published in November. According to the survey:
- 50 percent of mothers say they do more than their spouse or partner when it comes to household chores, but only 32 percent of fathers agree with that notion.
- 46 percent of women think household chores are shared equally, but 56 percent of men say those responsibilities are shared evenly.
- Who thinks it’s difficult to balance family and job responsibilities? Sixty percent of women and 52 percent of men.
- Among working mothers, in particular, 41 percent report that being a parent has made it harder for them to advance in their career; about half that proportion of working fathers (20 percent) say the same thing.
The survey also shows that in two-parent families, parenting and household responsibilities are shared more equally when both the mother and the father work full time than when the father is employed full time and the mother is employed part time or not employed. But even in households where both parents work full time, many say a large share of the day-to-day parenting responsibilities falls to mothers.
Finally, as more mothers have entered the U.S. workforce in the past several decades, the share of two-parent households in which both parents work full time now stands at 46 percent, up from 31 percent in 1970.
Read the full report online.
Trending News
