Why you both honestly believe you are doing more
In 182 US couples measured with time diaries, the gap did not exist before the birth. Nine months after it, women were doing 77 hours of work a week and men 69.
This is the argument almost every couple has, and there is a study that explains why it does not resolve.
The New Parents Project followed 364 people in 182 heterosexual couples in a large midwestern American city. All were becoming first-time parents. Both partners were employed and both planned to return to work. They were measured in the third trimester and again at nine months after the birth. Crucially, they were measured two ways: with surveys, and with time diaries, in which people record what they were actually doing hour by hour.
Before the birth, there was no gap. Total work, paid and unpaid together, ran to 56 hours a week for women and 59 hours for men. The men's was slightly higher, because of longer paid hours. Housework time was approximately equal. The authors state it flatly: the gender gap was not present prebirth but emerged postbirth.
Nine months after the birth, total work including time engaged with the child was 77 hours a week for women and 69 for men.
Per day, women added somewhere between about two and three hours of work; men added about forty minutes. The range is not vagueness. It depends on whether time spent engaging with the child is counted as work: the paper's own abstract and discussion differ on that point, so both figures are given here with the definition attached.
Scaled up, the authors put it this way: over the course of a year, parenthood increased women's total workload by about 4 1/2 weeks of 24-hour days, whereas parenthood increased men's total workload by approximately 1 1/2 weeks
. Counting child engagement narrows that difference to about 2.6 weeks a year.
Now the part that is the actual topic. On the survey, both partners reported that they had increased their total work by more than four hours a day. Men over-estimated their post-birth workload by about 26 hours; women by about 19. The survey data even showed men doing more housework than women. The time diaries showed the opposite. The authors wrote:
had we relied on only these data, we would have reported no gender discrepancy in men and women's total workload after the arrival of a child.
Read that twice. Measured with a survey, the gap disappears. Measured with a diary, it is eight hours a week. The gap between you is not mainly a gap in willingness. It is a gap in perception. Two people who each sincerely believe they are working four extra hours a day are not going to settle this by arguing about who is right, because both are reporting honestly and both are wrong.
A companion analysis of the same couples looked at what each partner was doing at the moments the other was working. On non-workdays, fathers were at leisure for 47% of the time mothers were doing childcare, and 35% of the time mothers were doing routine housework. Mothers were at leisure for only about 16% to 19% of the time fathers were doing those same things.
"I am not saying you are not trying. I am saying the thing we are each estimating cannot be estimated."