There are four of us in my family: my mum who earns money, my grandma who has already been retired, my brother and me. My mother is employed in Veszprém by the government. She works in an office, but she tend to organise different programs especially for young people, like career counselling and charity concerts. Many years ago, she used to work in Várpalota, dealing with unemployed people. Then she came to Fehérvár for some years.
How do you share the housework in your family? It is my mum who does most of the housework in my family. I help with the cleaning and with the washing-up, and sometimes with the laundry, too, and I love helping with the cooking. My brother and I clean our own rooms and take care of our dog, but, what we completely boring find is shopping. My mum can go to plenty of shops a day and she can waste 4 or 5 hours a weekend on buying food and clothes!
We rarely iron our clothes in my family, just our shirts and my brother’s suit. He is into DIY and he can fix things easily, except the water taps (he can fix his desk all by himself! J). I can change the light bulbs as well and sometimes I clean the windows. We are environment-conscious and we have energy-saving household devices. We have a vakuum-cleaner, a washing-machine, a microwave-oven, mixers, blenders, an oven, a toaster, a percolator, a lawn-mower and an electric drill.
In addition to their childcare responsibilities, women with young children often have to do more housework, thus making an already unequal balance even more skewed. The division of housework between partners depends on the life cycle of households, including childbearing, which is perhaps the single most relevant factor (Birch et al., 2009).
Family Sharing Household Chores
After giving birth, women tend to be more burdened with housework, as well as having increased childcare responsibilities. This depends partly on practical circumstances, such as maternity leave, and partly on cultural and value-related attitudes. In Hungary, studies on the division of housework within households have shown that even though their labour market participation is very high, women traditionally bear the brunt of household responsibilities (Gregor and Kováts, 2020).
The prevalence of this phenomenon - also known as the ‘second shift’ (Hochschild and Machung, 1989) - depends not only on the external workload, but also on place of residence, education and age, including the age difference between partners. In a recent study, my colleagues and I analysed the amount and share of housework performed by women during pregnancy and when the child is 6 months old (Veroszta et al., 2022).
According to data from the Cohort ’18 survey, already during pregnancy, the burden of everyday domestic tasks - cooking, washing, shopping, cleaning, etc - is heavily skewed towards women. Men are most likely to do maintenance work in or around the house. The most common joint or shared activities include shopping, managing household finances and organizing leisure activities. These data reflect the average Hungarian couple with a 6-month-old child.
However, when this baby is not the first child in the household, the division of housework is even more heavily tilted against mothers. Not only do fathers with more children take on fewer tasks, but there is also a big reduction in shared household activities (Figure 2). Depending on the number of children, the picture differs if we look not at the absolute number of tasks, but at the increase in tasks after the birth - i.e. the relative extent of the change.
On average, a pregnant woman mainly or always performs 2.4 household tasks out of 7. For those with a 6-month-old child, the average is higher: 2.75 tasks. Breaking the data down by parity, we find, not surprisingly, that mothers with more children do most of the housework in absolute terms. However, the relative increase in the number of tasks is smaller for them - with the exception of families with four children or more, where both the absolute and the relative burden on mothers increases significantly with the arrival of a new child.
Unloading the dishwasher, mopping the floor, cleaning the loo... what is your most hated household chore? We all know there are jobs around the house which have to be done regularly, even if they are sometimes boring or unpleasant. But who tends to do the most amount of jobs in your household?
Figures from UN Women, an organisation promoting gender equality, suggest that every day women around the world spend three hours more than men on unpaid care and domestic work.
According to a survey conducted by Good Housekeeping magazine earlier this year, what is the most hated household chore in Britain? 23% said cleaning the windows. The discussion continues with examples of chores, fairness, and how responsibilities are shared in different contexts.
We all know there are jobs around the house which have to be done regularly, even if they are sometimes boring or unpleasant. The division of labour is a way of organising work where different tasks are done by different groups of people. The idiom take a breather means to stop what you're doing for a short time and rest. If you pull your weight, you work as hard as everyone else doing the same job.
There is always a lot to do, so I help my mother with watering the flowers, tidying up, cleaning up the mess, and hanging out the washing. Fortunately, we have some labor-saving devices, like the Hoover, microwave oven, washing machine, and dishwasher. I like to keep my place clean and tidy, that’s why I always put my things back on the shelf and I have very well-organized drawers.