By Nathan Seppa
Maybe it’s the apron. Couples in the United States in which the men do more chores around the house have less sex than those in which the husbands don’t do the dishes and laundry as much, a new study finds. The findings appear in the February American Sociological Review.
The division of labor in the typical U.S. household became more egalitarian between 1965 and 1995 says study coauthor Sabino Kornrich, a sociologist at the Juan March Institute in Madrid. As women entered the workforce in droves and had smaller families, men took on more chores.
But the new study, a snapshot of more than 3,500 heterosexual married couples in the United States in the early 1990s, finds that wives were still doing four-fifths of the household chores traditionally associated with women: doing dishes, washing clothes, cooking, cleaning and shopping. The husbands did a bare majority of traditionally male jobs, which comprised yard work, auto maintenance, driving and paying bills, Kornrich says.
Against this backdrop, the new analysis finds that men reported having sex 5.2 times per month on average; women said their average was 5.6 times. Couples in which the man did a greater-than-average share of traditionally women’s chores reported less sex than couples in which men carried a below-average load. Couples in which the husband did all the “women’s work” had one-third less sex than those in which the man did none of it.