There now exists a small cottage industry designed to expose a vast, seemingly intractable form of gender inequality embedded, we’re told, in nearly every heterosexual relationship: the unequal division of household labor. Women, according to author and entrepreneur Eve Rodsky, are still “shouldering 2/3 or more of the unpaid domestic work and childcare for their homes and families.” And not only are women continuing to do more cooking, cleaning, and childcare than men, but they face additional pressures in the form of the “mental load,” or the invisible cognitive work that goes into maintaining a household — keeping track of which snacks the kids will eat, scheduling doctor’s appointments, remembering relatives’ birthdays and buying thoughtful presents for them.

Rodsky, however, has a solution. In 2019, she created Fair Play, a tool to help couples divide household responsibilities more fairly. Based on her best-selling book of the same title, Fair Play is a set of cards that lists one hundred common household chores. Each card represents not only a physical task, like preparing weekday dinners, but also the conception and planning of that task — for instance, deciding on a menu and procuring the ingredients for said dinners. Fair Play, which is now backed by Reese Witherspoon’s media company Hello Sunshine, has expanded to include a documentary and even an entire Fair Play Policy Institute, which funds research and advocacy related to caregiving and also certifies official Fair Play Facilitators, who coach couples in learning the Fair Play method to equitably divide their household labor.

The distribution of unpaid work in the home has also been the subject of several buzzy books published over the last few years, including Darcy Lockman’s All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership; Gemma Hartley’s Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward; Megan K. Stack’s Women’s Work: A Personal Reckoning with Labor, Motherhood, and Privilege; and Jessica Grose’s Screaming on the Inside: The Unsustainability of American Motherhood. Most recently, journalist Lyz Lenz’s bestseller, This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life, advocated divorce as the most liberating and logical solution to the endless unpaid work foisted on women in marriages. “Women are taught that it is noble to lose themselves inside their marriage. To give up everything for home and children, even themselves,” Lenz wrote in her book. “I often wonder how many stories, how many scientific breakthroughs, how many plays, musical scores, and innovations, have been tossed onto the pyre of human marriage.”

Then there are the podcasts and social media stars. The podcast The Mom Room tackles topics from “mom guilt” to sleep deprivation to discussions of why mothers so often become the “default parent.” Content creators like Paige Connell and Libby Ward share posts documenting the mental load and their own experiences with burnout for hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram and TikTok. And interactive projects like BillthePatriarchy.com and journalist Amy Westervelt’s “Invisible Labor Calculator” allow you to see, in stark dollar amounts, just how much women are being shortchanged, even two decades into the twenty-first century.

There is, in other words, a steady supply of — and clear demand for — a type of twenty-first-century feminist consciousness-raising around lingering gender inequality in the home. But what has been explored in less depth is the fact that the writers, experts, and entrepreneurs who have risen to prominence through conducting this sort of consciousness-raising — along with most of their audiences — are affluent, college-educated women who, at least in theory, have access to a wide array of resources for alleviating these burdens, not to mention the financial freedom and social capital to choose egalitarian relationships with partners who will happily do their share of domestic labor. What, then, explains the stubborn persistence of their unhappiness? And if even well-off women are being pushed to the breaking point when it comes to household work, where does that leave everyone else?

Today women in nearly every country in the world — from repressive theocracies like Afghanistan to the famously egalitarian Nordic states — still do more housework and childcare than men. According to a recent article in the journal Socius, between 2022 and 2023, married women in the United States performed about 1.6 times as much housework and 1.8 times as much childcare as men.

In 1989, the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild characterized the housework and childcare undertaken by women as a “second shift.” In her landmark book on the subject, Hochschild interviewed fifty couples in the San Francisco Bay Area on their division of labor in the home and found that, despite women’s mass entry into the workforce, they were nevertheless still taking on the lion’s share of cooking, cleaning, and childcare at home. Hochschild characterized this imbalance as a “stalled revolution” in which men and society alike had failed to support women’s increased labor force participation. “Women changed rapidly but the jobs they went out to and the men they came home to have not changed — or not so much,” she wrote in the introduction to The Second Shift. “So marriage has become a shock absorber of tensions borne by this ‘stalled revolution.’”

The idea of a stalled revolution gained more traction during the 1990s, particularly as scholarly research indicated that progress on several measures of gender equality — the division of housework and childcare, women’s labor force participation, and the gender wage gap, among others — had stagnated in that decade. As historian Stephanie Coontz has pointed out, between the mid-1990s and the early 2000s, there was also a curious uptick in the percentages of both men and women who said they believed that the ideal family structure was a male breadwinner and female homemaker.

However, despite much renewed attention to the gender gaps in domestic labor that remain, the picture of the stalled revolution is complicated by several factors, including, first and foremost, the passage of time. For instance, while it’s noteworthy that women are still doing 1.6 times as much housework as men, this represents a drastic reduction from the 1960s, when women were doing around seven times as much. “I find it useful to approach contemporary studies with a little historical perspective,” Coontz said to me in an interview. “There has been very significant change.”

The steep decline over the last half century in the amount of time women spend on housework can be attributed to several factors, including advances in time-saving technologies such as microwaves and washing machines. More important, women’s increased participation in the paid workforce meant that they simply had less time to spend on housework; on top of that, some began earning enough at work to outsource portions of their housework and childcare. And while the closing of the gender gap in housework has been driven largely by this reduction in women’s time spent on housework, it’s also the case that since the 1960s, men in the United States and elsewhere have increased the amount of housework that they do.

What’s notable is that when you count the total labor done by men and women today to support a household — that is, both paid work outside the home and unpaid work in the home — men and women are contributing nearly equal amounts of time. “Women anywhere in the world still do more housework than men. The flipside of that is that men still do more paid work than women,” sociologist and time use expert Liana Sayer told me. “If you look at the quantitative data and add up time in paid work and time in unpaid work — including housework, childcare, and shopping for the household — then it’s pretty close to equivalent hours for men and women.” This dynamic, of course, presents its own set of problems: if men are indeed doing more paid work, they’re also earning more money and advancing in their careers relative to their wives, which puts women at a disadvantage if the marriage ends. Yet this trade-off also suggests that the notion of a second shift is, in many ways, misleading or incomplete. And as sociologist Melissa Milkie pointed out to me when we spoke, Hochschild’s study in the 1980s was limited to a group of Bay Area households in which both parents were working full time and raising preschool-age kids, which is to say, a group that was not nationally representative. “Qualitatively, Hochschild really captured the moment,” Milkie said. “But overall, this was a tiny portion of mothers.”

In the twenty-first century, the gaps in housework have continued to close, if at a slower pace. Milkie, who has studied changes in the division of household work that have taken place over the last twenty-five years, found that between 2003 and 2023 men took up more core housework tasks that were traditionally considered women’s work, like doing laundry, tidying up after meals, and cleaning the house. Over that same period, men also increased the time they spent on childcare. “Men have changed substantially over this period,” Milkie told me. “And the changes that we’re seeing are likely normative changes, or changes in what’s expected of men. That’s pretty big.” These normative changes also have the potential to lead to more positive developments down the road concerning the division of unpaid work in the home: as men continue to do more laundry, cooking, and cleaning, society might increasingly perceive such tasks as gender-neutral household chores rather than “women’s work.”

In their latest study, Milkie and her coauthors also observed some unexpected trends in household work that developed during the COVID-19 pandemic. As businesses and schools closed and workers experienced layoffs or began working remotely, commentators ominously predicted a coming “she-cession” that could take decades to recover from. In November 2020, UN Women deputy executive director Anita Bhatia cautioned that the combination of women’s job losses and their increased caregiving responsibilities during the pandemic could lead to a “real risk of reverting to 1950s gender stereotypes.” And the following February, the New York Times ran a long profile of feminist Silvia Federici, one of the founders of the 1970s Wages for Housework movement, with the headline, “The Lockdown Showed How the Economy Exploits Women. She Already Knew.”

But data from the pandemic that Milkie and her coauthors analyzed show that few of these dire predictions materialized. Not only had women’s labor force participation largely rebounded by 2023, but, according to the authors, gender gaps in housework during the pandemic narrowed: “Both men and women increased their time on things like cooking and cleaning because there was more to do at home,” Milkie explained. “But after the pandemic, men generally maintained that higher level of housework they had started doing, whereas women tended to drop back to the level where they had been before the pandemic.”

All of this indicates that not only is the breakdown of housework somewhat less lopsided than much of the popular literature suggests, but also more gender equality may have been achieved over the last several decades than progressives tend to think. As researchers Oriel Sullivan and Jonathan Gershuny have argued, the shifts in domestic labor between men and women over time add up not to a momentous gender revolution but rather “a slow drip of change, perhaps with consequences that are barely noticeable from year to year, but that in the end are persistent enough to lead to the dissolution of existing structures.”