Men Learn To Prepare Food, Still Won't Do Laundry

Here’s something to get excited about: Working men are doing far more chores around the house. Well actually, there’s still a huge gap between the amount of time working women spend on housework compared to their male partners. We’re supposed to be impressed by their effort, but when dudes start from Don Draper there’s a lot of room for improvement.

The Telegraph reports that research out of an Oxford University conference on how we use our time found that men are starting to pull their fair share around the house — if you look at certain statistics. A recent time use survey in the U.K. found the women work an average of five hours and 55 minutes a day on employment and chores, which is only 18 minutes more than men, who toil for five hours and 37 minutes. But these numbers are misleading because they include the unemployed. (The only other way you’d arrive at an average workday of six hours is if you didn’t count the time employees spend reading blogs when they should be working.)

Britain’s Office for National Statistics reports that men spend an average of 38.4 hours in paid employment compared to 33.3 hours for women. Among employed couples, men spend an average of two hours and 28 minutes on household chores, while women spend four hours and 40 minutes cooking and cleaning. Though women still spend nearly twice as much time on housework, men would like you to note that since the ’70s, they’ve started doing an extra hour of chores — but not laundry. British men still spend only an average of four minutes per week on washing and ironing. It’s believed that men may have been inspired to pick up a spatula by TV chefs, but until Alton Brown develops a reality show about a laundromat, washing clothes will still be considered women’s work.