Recession Mama Drama

According to a Time Magazine article, women are bearing the brunt of the recession, even when it's their husbands who are laid off.

Here's my favorite part: To be sure, many of these cuts affect both the husband and wife, but women — even those who work outside the home — still take on more household responsibilities, including cooking, cleaning and taking care of children, whatever their ages.

There's actual data to back this up in this article from the New York Times: "The most recent figures from the University of Wisconsin’s National Survey of Families and Households show that the average wife does 31 hours of housework a week while the average husband does 14 — a ratio of slightly more than two to one. If you break out couples in which wives stay home and husbands are the sole earners, the number of hours goes up for women, to 38 hours of housework a week, and down a bit for men, to 12, a ratio of more than three to one. That makes sense, because the couple have defined home as one partner’s work.But then break out the couples in which both husband and wife have full-time paying jobs. There, the wife does 28 hours of housework and the husband, 16.

Where the housework ratio is two to one, the wife-to-husband ratio for child care in the United States is close to five to one. In a family where Mom stays home and Dad goes to work, she spends 15 hours a week caring for children and he spends 2. In families in which both parents are wage earners, Mom’s average drops to 11 and Dad’s goes up to 3."

Fascinating trends! Some of us "modern women" are getting wise to this. Kudos to you working ladies who are solely responsibility of their household chores, but I have no idea how I could work all day, come home, take care of MacBaby, cook dinner and clean up. So, I don't. MacDaddy is the Executive Chef of the family (and will be blogging here about cooking in the near future) and the Trashman (most of the time). I am the Baby Food Provider, Laundress, and general cleaner-upper. Diaper duty is divided equally.

MacDaddy and I never sat down and created a chore spreadsheet, our division just happened naturally based on our strengths and weaknesses. However, gender chore sharing is a movement! With actual names! It's known as Equally Shared Parenting or Third Path.

Perhaps another silver lining to the recession, in addition to helping the collective "us" curb spending, is the media attention to traditional gender roles.

How do you deal with chore division in your family? Has the recession impacted your routine?