Women do twice as many hours of housework than men

(CS) A Statec study has revealed that women dedicate around 19 hours per week to household tasks, more than double than men, who clock in some eight hours per week.

In households with children the number of hours of housework is even less equally distributed, with women taking on 24 hours per week in comparison to ten hours contributed by men to managing the household.

Half of the men questioned said they contributed around seven hours per week to household tasks, with 13 percent saying they did not help in the household at all.

Tasks taken into account by the study include preparing food, shopping, washing up, cleaning, doing the laundry, and similar tasks.

Hours working in the household increase dramatically between the ages of 20-29 and 30-39 from 9.5 hours to 15.3 hours.

Another aspect of the study shows that full-time employment has little effect on the hours men spend working in the household (an average of eight hours in both scenarios), while stay-at-home women spend around four hours more per week doing household tasks than their full-time employed counterparts.

Women spend more time with children

Women were also found to spend more time with their children, 35 hours as opposed to 28 hours for men.

Luxembourg's parents are thereby above the European average of 28 hours per week spent by women with their children, with a 17 hour European average for men.

Social parenting time, including playing with children, talking to them or doing other activities together takes up around 44 percent of this time spent together, with other duties including driving children to and from school, feeding, washing and clothing children, or helping them with their homework.

For women, the time dedicated to their children also increases heavily with more children, while it stays more or less the same for men.

Even though the educational level of parents has little influence on how much time they spend with their children, stay-at-home parents spend considerably more time with their children, with high income parents spending around ten hours less per week with their children than families from the bottom 20 percent of the income scale.

Luxembourg's diverse make up also provided an insight into the distribution of childcare tasks, with the smallest difference of hours spent by men and women with their children in Portuguese families (6.9 per week). Topping the statistics are German and Belgian parents, where men spend on average 18.4 hours a week less with their children than the women.

To read the study please visit Statec.lu