Two is better than one say lesbian couples
Reading Gail Collins’ magnum opus on women in America after 1960, I was struck by a section about housework.
Specifically Collins made the point that only lesbian couples tended to share the household chores evenly (at least in the surveys that bothered to include on the subject). So I went digging … I didn’t find anything about whether being in a same sex marriage makes a difference, but being in a same sex couple definitely does.
An Australian survey in 2010/11 (Work, Love and Play) shows the same thing: “Our findings are that lesbian couples are more likely to report a fairly equal division of labour in their household, compared to their heterosexual counterparts. On the whole, lesbian mothers are less inclined to feel like they shoulder more of the housework or parenting responsibilities than their partner.”
Studies (mostly American) from 2004 have been finding the same thing. Instead of falling into boring and unfair sterotypes like ‘breadwinning man’ versus ‘care-giving’ woman, both gay and lesbian couples are doing it a different way. Less shaped by role models, and also more likely to be in dual-income childless couples, the queers tend to do it this way: men specialise in certain tasks, but usually equally, and women tend to share most or all of the tasks, also roughly equally.
Well done us.
P.S. (I wonder how many of us just sub-contract the work out to a cleaner?)
Tags: gay and lesbian gender roles, lesbian household chores, Lesbians housework
