Women are encouraged to be independent in today's culture, and several countries are promoting a more progressive mindset when it comes to the division of housework. In the old days, the women were left to take care of the house and their kids with the husband busy at work.
However, a new study conducted by researchers from the University of Oxford revealed that there has been a big shift in who gets to do household chores nowadays, according to The Daily Mail. The research analysed 66 "time use studies" to observe how the distribution of housework changed between the years 1961 and 2011.
For the past 50 years, women in 19 countries were found to have committed themselves to do more chores compared to men, spending an average of two hours of housework each day.
However, researches noticed that men's overall share of the work at home has increased rapidly. Even men coming from "traditional" countries began accepting more and more domestic tasks in the early 2000s.
Out of the 19 countries involved in the research, it was learned that women from Italy and Spain were the ones doing the most domestic tasks, while the men helped out the least. Still, researchers found some progress in these two countries.
Even though Italian women were doing around 243 minutes more housework each day than men in 1980, the number was reduced to just 183 minutes by 2008. The same trend was noticed in Spain, where women were doing 35 minutes less housework each day in 2009. From 174 minutes, the numbers dropped down to 139 in 2009.
Women from Poland, Yugoslavia, France and Germany also assumed a bigger chunk of the housework compared to men. In comparison, women from Nordic countries were found to do just over an hour more housework than men.
"The overall picture is of a continuing move towards men and women sharing the housework more equally," said study co-author Oriel Sullivan, Professor of Sociology of Gender and Co-Director of the Centre for Time Use Research at the University of Oxford.
"To make further inroads, policy-makers and employers may need to find more ways of encouraging a healthy life-family balance in the workplace, and provide further support for parents with sufficient funding for early child-care facilities and greater opportunities for parental leave," he added.
