Donald McNeil New York Times
Men hunt elephants. Women clean caves and nurse babies.
Fast forward to 1950. Men hunt money. Women breastfeed babies and drive children to baseball clubs.
Fast forward to 2004. Men and women hunt money. Women still breastfeed babies. Men hunting remote control.
A report published at the beginning of this month by the US Central Bureau of Statistics showed that although the situation has changed since the Stone Age, many phenomena remain the same. The bureau interviewed 21 thousand Americans, and asked them what they did the day before, minute by minute. Men worked one hour more than women. However, in households where both spouses work, the women were engaged in raising the children for one more hour a day. In families where the children are older, women spent six hours a day in "secondary occupation", such as shopping with the children, while the men spent only four.
About 20% of the men reported that they do some of the housework - cleaning or laundry - compared to 55% of the women. About 35% of men cook or wash dishes, compared to 66% of women. Surveys conducted in the early 15s show that men then performed only 10-XNUMX% of the housework. However, compared to the flooding of the labor market with women, this figure still looks quite poor. Well, are the men simply idle, or do they have an excuse? Is it possible that for a biological reason they are unable to share the burden?
The animal kingdom is so diverse, and full of so many exceptions, that it is impossible to state this with certainty. For example, lionesses hunt and in seahorses it is the males who bear the offspring. Julie A. Brains, a sociologist at the University of Washington who has studied the division of labor in married couples, is not a big believer in biological or genetic explanations, she says, particularly because men have proven that they can do much more. Anne Fausto Sterling, a biologist from Brown University who studied the differences between sex hormones, agrees that "there is no scientific basis" for a genetic explanation, and that the behavior patterns are probably learned in childhood.
Today many men do learn to do much more than their fathers, but they are still picky. Most of them would rather change a diaper than clean the toilet, which is defined by Brains as "the bottom of the task hierarchy". Couples may angrily throw the toilet brush at each other because they have no parental example on the matter. A sewage system appeared long after the traditional division of labor, and toilets were installed in houses only in the Victorian period.
In 1935, the anthropologist George Peter Murdock examined the function of women and men in dozens of tribal societies. Hunting, fishing and farming were distinctly male jobs. Cooking and carrying water were women's jobs. The men processed metal, wood and stones, built weapons, boats and musical instruments. Women wove cloth and made cooking utensils. Some of the tasks were divided more equally: taking care of poultry and cows, gathering oysters, processing skins, building a shelter, preparing alcohol or medicine. Many tasks, according to Roy D'Andrade, an anthropologist at the University of Connecticut, are determined by the question of whether the children can join in without getting hurt. If you're hunting seals in the Arctic in a kayak, "you can't do it with a bunch of kids hanging on you," he said.
According to Richard Schweder, an anthropologist at the University of Chicago and the author of the book "Why Do Men Barbecue", as soon as the nomads settled down and began to cultivate the land, the division between work performed inside the house and work performed outside was created. The women are more vulnerable during pregnancy and breastfeeding, and because of that they stay inside the house and manage it. According to Schweder, the weight of the dishes also differentiates between the sexes. Women tend to perform the sowing duties in societies where hoes are used, but the men plow.
Marriage counselors argue that men often fail to perform tasks, not because of prehistoric influences, but because of modern partners who strive for perfection. The "maternal gatekeeper" theory suggests that women ask men to share the burden of work, but then insist on checking the outcome. When they criticize it or even redo it, their husbands angrily leave the arena or, a more insidious idea, make sure not to do the job properly - so they won't be asked to do it again.
Brains says she found an unexpected anomaly in the study: men tend to participate more in housework, while women's salary is more or less similar to theirs. But when women earn much more than men, they also tend to do a greater share of the housework. This is most common among black women, and in her estimation, they compensate for the fact that they earn a higher salary by performing more traditional roles in the home. Their husbands, according to her, often choose jobs that are stereotypically considered "male jobs", such as mowing the lawn or washing the car.
John M. Gutman, the psychologist who founded the "Love Lab" at the University of Washington, an apartment where couples live under the watchful eye of researchers, did a study in 1998 with the participation of newly married couples. The more the man participated in child care, housework and small talk, the higher the woman's satisfaction and the level of sexual intimacy between the couple.
Here's an incentive.
They knew evolution - the rise of man
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