Mr. Mom? Men Doing More Chores

Oct. 14 -- By day, Dan Mulvenon works full time as vice president of public relations for a cable TV cooperative. By night, he's often doing housework — maybe shopping for groceries, paying the bills, vacuuming or running errands near his Olathe, Kan., home.

It's only fair, he says. When his sons, now 20 and 16, were younger, Mulvenon was on the road a lot for work and his wife did virtually all of the housework. Now, Mulvenon's wife works a stressful job as a trauma case manager in a major Kansas City hospital, and she's getting a master's degree. So the couple shares chores.

"I think turnabout is fair play," said Mulvenon, 48, who doesn't consider himself heroic for sharing housework. "I talk to the neighbors or people at work, and I don't think I do substantially more [than other men do]. It's part of the cultural shift. Men understand it just takes more cooperation to get these things done."

Statistically, Mulvenon is right on. Men are doing more around the house.

Fathers do about two hours of housework on any given weekday — that's 42 minutes more per day on average than in 1977. Meanwhile, mothers have reduced their daily chore time by approximately 42 minutes a day, according to the National Study of the Changing Workforce by the Families and Work Institute, which surveys representative samples of the U.S. work force every five years.

Mothers, though, are still doing more, according to the latest data. Women in dual-earner families put in about three hours of housework a day — one-third more than their husbands.

"What we're seeing is the catching up of the sexual and labor market forces, that men are picking up somewhat more of the slack at home. Men are slowly and sometimes reluctantly assuming more of daily tasks," said Scott Coltrane, sociology professor at the University of California, Riverside, and author of Family Man. "I have seen lots of change in one generation."

Ray Kopczynski, 55, of Albany, Ore., does kitchen cleanup after his wife cooks the meals. He stacks the dishes, she loads the dishwasher. He does his laundry, and his wife does hers. He vaccuums and changes bed linens about half the time, he says.