Household heroes: Startups in the modern home

New data suggests that married men are stepping up to the plate (and the sink, and the washing machine), narrowing a decades-long “chore gap” that has historically hampered women’s workforce participation and societal mobility. New tools for chore-sharing are entering the market. SN’s Sujata Gupta sums it up tidily.

🧺 Laundry logic: Quantifying labor that makes households run

A multidecade analysis of U.S. time-use data released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reveals that married men have significantly increased their contribution to housework in the past two decades. Researchers found that from 2003 to 2005, married women spent an average of 4.2 hours per week to every one hour their male spouses spent on tasks like meal prep and tidying. By 2022 to 2023, that number had shrunk to 2.5 hours to every one hour. It’s still more than twice, but we’ll take the win.

This study highlights that men have become more involved in physical chores like laundry and cleaning. Yet other studies show that women still shoulder a disproportionate share of the “cognitive labor” or mental load required to manage a household. The lead researcher attributes some of the shift to new habits men developed during the COVID-19 pandemic, with more time spent in the home.