Jessica Valenti reads USA Today's writeup of a study concluding that married women do more housework than do cohabiting women, and concludes that she may have to stay single.
I'm not so sure that the study is really showing a causal connection here. It seems very plausible that the cohabiting sample going to contain people who are less tradition-minded than does the married sample. Married people are also probably more likely to have children than are are cohabiters and one can much more easily understand why the presence or absence of children might cause a shift in the housework burden (which isn't to say that one should endorse this dynamic) than why marriage, as such, should cause a shift.
Photo by Flickr user Rick Takagi used under a Creative Commons license



When men and women cohabit, the more common scenario is her moving into "his" place. But married couples tend to buy a place together, giving them each a theoretically equal stake. It's unsurprising that guys tend to do a greater share of the work when it's "their" residence at issue. I'd imagine this accounts for a large part of the discrepancy.
The distinction breaks down, of course, once you start talking about long-term cohabitation, but the article says the study didn't collect any data on the length of the relationships. Many couples buy a house together at the time they get married or shortly thereafter; very few cohabiting couples rush right out to buy a house.
Posted by Steve | August 30, 2007 11:25 AM