6 Ways Men Gaslight Their Partners About Household Labor Inequity

Image: Tracey Hocking on Unsplash

If you’re a typical woman in a typical heterosexual marriage, the challenges of household labor are already familiar to you. It might be because your own life is filled with endless emotional labor, errand-running, homework-helping, and cleaning that your husband just can’t seem to do. Or it might be because this is one of the most popular topics in online parenting groups. Many people outside of heterosexual marriages, however, have never heard of this issue—due in large part to the fact that we don’t care about what happens to women, and especially to mothers.

The data are depressing: just 20% of men clean daily, and women do 60% more household labor than men do—even when both parties work outside of the home. Rather than sharing the load of household labor, men add an average of 7 hours to their partners’ workload each week. Men are buying their free time with their partners’ exhaustion and suffering. It’s a great deal for men, because it means they get to enjoy thriving children and a clean home, without actually contributing much to either. No wonder so many men are reluctant to give it up.

Not all men are this way. Asserting otherwise lets men off the hook, labeling them as innately inferior rather than acknowledging that this is a choice. For men who view their partners as fully human, trading a little extra free time for the suffering of a partner is unacceptable.

We just have different standards

Different standards means a disagreement about which cleaner to use, or whether you should vacuum every day. Reasonable people can debate whether parents should oversee all homework or just make sure it’s done. But what’s not a reasonable debate is whether it’s ok to leave food out, whether the house needs to be reasonably clean, whether it’s important to stay on top of developmental milestones and schoolwork. Lazy men and those who would defend them like to pretend that maternal gatekeeping—the insistence on an unreasonable standard that no one can follow—is the real reason men don’t fully participate in running the house. There is no data to support this claim. The problem is not one of different standards. The problem is that, in many marriages, the man has no standard for housekeeping and childcare at all, and so pretends the woman’s expectations are unreasonable.

But I work and she doesn’t

Childcare and household labor are 24/7 jobs. Work is limited to about 40 hours a week. If a woman does the majority of household labor, she is on call to work 168 hours per week, compared to a man’s 40. In no world is this a reasonable figure. When a man works outside the home and the woman doesn’t, there’s only one equitable way to split the labor: the woman does all the childcare and housework while the man is at work, and when he returns home, they split it equally. Anything less and the man is buying his free time with the woman’s exhaustion. The data is clear: on average, men are doing significantly less work per week than women when we factor in household labor and childcare.

According to comprehensive time logs, the average man spends 5.33 hours on paid work per day, compared to 4.1 hours for the average woman. Yet women spend an average of 4 additional hours on unpaid labor, compared to men’s 2. Even taking into account that men are more likely to work outside of the home, women still do more work per day. And in dual earner families, this doesn’t change. Women still do about 60% more measurable labor than men. That figure doesn’t take into account labor that’s difficult to measure, like planning schedules or thinking about whether a child is hitting developmental milestones.

When the person who works outside the home thinks that entitles them to little or no home labor, the split is inevitably going to be terribly unfair, with the woman never getting any down time or time off, and the man kicking up his feet while she works.

She just needs to ask for help

The hidden assumption in this apparently reasonable request is that it is the woman’s job to know, identify, and organize what needs to be done, to tell the man to do it, then to follow up with him to ensure it is done. And by presenting the man’s role as “helper,” the burden of household labor still remains on the woman. This ensures that, even if the couple ends up splitting the physical house labor, the woman will still end up doing much more intellectual and emotional labor. It puts the woman in the untenable position of being mother, taskmaster, and manager to a person who is supposed to be her equal.

Let’s be clear: men are not dumb. They are just as capable as women of knowing how to take care of a home and the children who live in it. The y chromosome does not carry a mutation that makes it impossible for men to know that pets and children need food, dishes must be cleaned, and meals should generally be healthy.

Stop nagging me

Ah, the paradox of household labor inequity: if you don’t ask for help, it’s your fault he doesn’t pitch in. And if you do, you’re nagging him. The stigmatization of nagging is just another effort to silence women. If a man asks for something, he’s being a communicative partner. If a woman does, she’s being a nag. It’s the ultimate no-win situation, deliberately designed to prevent women from asking for what they need.

We do different chores, and she doesn’t notice the work I do

In many homes, certain chores belong to the man while others belong to the woman. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this division of labor. The challenge is that it often conceals glaring inequity. If the man’s chores happen only a few times a year, like changing the oil, or a few times a month, like mowing the lawn, then things are bound to be unequal unless he is also doing a hefty share of daily labor. The simple formula is this: does he get to relax while she does housework and helps the kids? Or are they both working together? The latter is the only acceptable division of labor.

She’s hormonal and irrational

This is the ultimate gaslighting tactic, masquerading as science. When a man blames pregnancy, periods, or menopause for a woman’s reasonable requests (and reasonable emotional reactions when those requests go ignored), the message is an abusive one: you can’t be trusted to assert what you need, to judge what is fair and unfair, or to behave like an adult. Men who blame women’s hormones for their own bad behavior are weaponizing the very fact of being a woman. It’s the ultimate misogyny.