60 hours a week? You think housewives are doing 8½ hours of solid house work every single day? Yeah, no.
For example, decide you prize cleanliness, then get a pet animal that leaves hair everywhere. Have three children doing sports several times a week and wash all sportswear after a single use. Remember every friend and relative's birthday and send them an appropriate and thoughtful card or gift, not just cash or a gift card. Repair damaged clothes when you can, as it's cheaper and also environmentally friendly. Change bedsheets and clean the bathroom on a more regular schedule. Separate the recycling in excruciating detail. Join the housing association board because god knows, someone needs to reign those idiots in. Accommodate fussy eaters by cooking multiple and sometimes complex meals, so you have to visit several supermarkets to get all the ingredients you need. Do nice and helpful things for other members of your community, to save up favours you'll be able to cash in later. Keep the garden looking nice. And of course you haven’t invited your friends to a dinner party yet...
Of course you don’t have to do this stuff, but if you’re looking at the subjects of an article about gender role performance, maybe you see it at a higher rate.
I unfortunately only have anecdotal evidence that 60h is not implausible.
Me and my wife have two kids and share most of the household work, it's not an even split (she does more). I would say that on average we both work from the time we get back home from work until the kids sleep, ~4hrs later. In addition to that, one of us probably spends some 30 mins each morning getting the kids ready for school. Saturdays and Sundays typically involve two cooked meals per day plus any bigger household work that the weekdays won't fit. So I guess we spend some 60h/week on chores.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a father of two. Like you, our work is not split evenly, though I like to think I take on a higher share than most similarly situated men. There are times when my time with my sons can be trying, and I can get behind counting some fraction of that time as work.
On the other hand, just today my son and I spent three hours going to and from a playdate with a friend of his. I'm also friends with the dad. It was a pleasant time for all involved, and we got some sun and some exercise. This is not an atypical way for us to spend a Sunday afternoon. If this is accounted for as "work" then I would say the statistic is a bit misleading, as that is not something most people I know would consider labor.
I'll be commuting home for an hour. That is work.
Tonight I'll be putting the kids to bed, then tidying up the kitchen. That is also work.
I think it is fair to say, that as an adult with kids, much of your time that you aren't doing something just for you, will to a degree be work. And that is OK. As long as you and your partner are happy with the split you have, then that is OK too.
I don't think there's any way to objectively measure that.
For example, it is undeniable that you've got to eat. You can get some tolerable food on the table in 15 minutes (e.g., ramen, Kraft Dinner). Adults, especially with kids, are usually expected to serve a wider variety of foods, especially healthier ones (~45 min to prepare?). Of course, you can also spend all day in kitchen making beef wellington and homemade bread. In the latter cases, some of that time is a "chore", but some of it is also essentially a hobby. Likewise for gardening, auto maintenance, and even keeping the house absolutely spotless strikes me as a kind of (odd) hobby.
You can say those analogues fall outside of “housework” ... sure, but then it’s like “hey programmer, you’ve got 60 hours in the week, why isn’t that feature done yet?”
I'm going to second that I'm incredulous.
If only I could bill for thinking about work.
Also if raising your own family is "work" what isn't work? Yeah and me going snowboarding is just emotional labor to prepare for the work week so let's call that work.
But if I'm in the bathroom at night and something clicks or I'm thinking about a problem during a meal, I'm not gonna bill for that.
So, no then.
Unless you are very junior, you
1) have to do those things
2) are paid for the time spent doing them
3) will not keep your job long if you simply neglect them or refuse to do them
I'm honestly baffled by these responses.
I find the 8 1/2 hours a day statistic to be perhaps true, since some types of work expand to fill the time allotted. I don't believe the 5.7 hrs a day statistic for working moms, though. That would imply that a working mom spends essentially every waking, non-commuting hour working on housework during the week, then six hours each day on the weekend.
My whole argument is that just as cooking, cleaning, and laundry shouldn't be all that's considered "housework"; coding, deploying, etc aren't all there is to "work" as a programmer.
I think "homemaking" makes the distinction clearer in the narrow case. In the larger sense, I'm just saying that "work" isn't just what's on your job title or how you'd describe yourself, e.g. "coder", but "all of that which is necessary to fulfill your duty".
I think there are a large number of working moms who'd agree with the statement, taken not literally but also not hyperbolically: "I spend essentially all my waking non-work time on homemaking (housework + parenting)"
I'm not making a squishy argument about "emotional labor" either, but if it means anything at all, it definitely includes attending to the emotional needs of your children & partner
Still, my wife regularly points out that I again forgot to do the laundry on that day off, and most of the time she still cooks that day. I want to, but still haven't fully picked up my share of the household work. And the worst part is that she still has to point this out to me.
I do better than most men and am still falling short.