The trouble is that these apps face an enormously difficult task in trying to overturn deeply rooted societal norms—girls in the kitchen with their mothers, boys playing with their fathers. Such expectations are part of what leaves women in heterosexual couples with so much of the housework (same-sex couples are noticeably more egalitarian). Once women become mothers, the imbalance gets worse.
Still, the issue is not if men can play an equal part in housework but how. Men in more egalitarian cultures, unsurprisingly, take on a much fairer share. And in those places, if neither partner has the time or energy, the government itself may come to their aid. In Sweden, which tops the Gender Equality Index in the EU, the state pays half the bill for hiring out chores like laundry and house cleaning—which means many more busy families can afford to do so. That, in turn, helps women’s earning potential. In Belgium, a similar state subsidy for outsourcing chores led to a significant increase in women’s employment.
In the United States, however, many women—mothers or not—are at a crisis point, with little in the way of safety nets like affordable or subsidized child care or healthcare.
Papering over inequalities
Part of the reason apps may be struggling to make a serious dent in women’s housework load is that much of the labor women do is not physical, but mental and emotional. The burden still falls mostly on women to anticipate the needs of those around them and make day-to-day decisions on behalf of the family, says Allison Daminger, a doctoral student in sociology at Harvard. These tasks might include researching the best deal for a couch or remembering that it’s time to schedule a child’s visit to the dentist. It’s time-consuming work, even if it’s mostly hidden from others.
Chore app design regularly further embeds the status quo: that it’s usually women who delegate household tasks. “I can’t think of a time [in my research] where a man made a list for his wife, but I can think of several instances where a wife made a list for her husband,” Daminger says.
Jaclyn Wong, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of South Carolina, is not only an expert on the role of gender expectations in couple dynamics. She’s also piloting her own app, a chore calendar that tries to dodge gendered traps—woman handles the cooking, man handles the yard work— by dividing the full range of household tasks between both partners. It also aims to put into writing exactly what each person is doing.
Williamson says that making the invisible labor visible in this way was one huge benefit of using her chore app. “It did help me to notice when my husband was contributing, and it helped my husband to notice that so many more chores exist than just sweeping, vacuuming, cooking, and dishes,” she says.
But not everyone enjoys seeing that discrepancy between a couple’s contributions. Wong’s research shows that this is an uphill battle: “There’s pushback. People get defensive when they are notified of ways they are not being equal partners,” she notes. The risk is that couples may abandon an app for that reason even if it could help them in the long run.
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