According to statistics, women still perform more unpaid domestic and family work than men. However, they are not dissatisfied with this, according to new research from the Austrian Institute for Family Research (ÖIF) at the University of Vienna.
For this purpose, 1,577 people in Austria between the ages of 16 and 88 were interviewed. The central result: a fair division of tasks in the household is considered important (by 91.5 percent), but is not always applied in practice (not by approximately one in five people). Yet the majority of respondents (89.6 percent) are very or at least somewhat satisfied with the division of labor they perform. For example, what is expected of the other person and what intangible benefits the partner provides play a role. This can be emotional affection, such as interaction with each other.
“The more affection I receive, the more I agree with an unequal division of the household. This applies more to women than to men (…). “It underlines how complex and fragile satisfaction is when social relationships are based on love,” write the authors of the study led by Christine Geserick.
Young people expect a fairer distribution
Another result of the research is that women do more unpaid work than men when there are children in the household, and that the income difference is large when the couple is older (65 years and over) or lives in rural areas. Conversely, young people and young adults up to the age of 20 in particular expect a particularly egalitarian division of labor – ‘fairer than with their parents’, says sociologist Geserick. “We see a difference between 28-year-olds and 55-year-olds compared to people over 65. And we see the difference not only in the requirements, but also in practice.”
Activities such as shopping, taking out the trash, washing and ironing laundry, cooking, planning vacations, and providing television and internet access were examined. In most areas, women do the majority of the work.
Source: Krone
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