on the division of (household) labor

From Kathleen Parker in the C-J back in June...

The only thing more tedious than doing housework is reading about housework. Yet with the gritty determination of a committed obsessive-compulsive, I plowed through an 8,000-word New York Times Magazine exposé on the current state of gender equity in the American home: "When Mom and Dad Share It All."

Apparently, men and women are still not equal partners. In fact, they're so unequal that they're more or less stuck in the same trends of 90 years ago, despite our best efforts to get men to be better women and women to be better men. Alas, still foiled.

The most recent figures from the University of Wisconsin's National Survey of Families and Households indicate that the average wife does 31 hours of housework a week compared to the average husband's 14. When wives stay home, they do 38 hours of housework a week compared to men's 12. Child care is even more lopsided. Apparently, these ratios hold true across most demographics, regardless of whether couples are white-collar or blue-collar, upper class or middle class.

Writer Lisa Belkin does yeoman's work in trying to pierce the mystery of why these divisions of labor haven't changed with the times....But little truck is given to the obvious: Men and women are hard-wired differently....Gender theorists who insist that only socialization is to blame for the unequal divisions of labor tend to search for any explanation other than simply that men and women may have different preferences....

At the University of Virginia, Steven E. Rhoads -- author of Taking Sex Differences Seriously -- led a study of 184 tenure-track academic couples and found that even the most presumably enlightened people within our culture fall into the same patterns because, well, they just do. Women -- including university professors -- "simply like child care more than men and are reluctant to cede many child care duties to their husbands," concluded the study's authors.

Harvard zoologist E.O. Wilson wrote in his book In Search of Nature that "what is" in human nature -- and what may explain our rut of domestic inequity -- probably goes back to our Pleistocene hunter-gatherer forebears.

None of which means we can't change, but it might take some time. Genetic bias isn't as malleable as gender bias and is intense enough, writes Wilson, "to cause a substantial division of labor even in the most free and most egalitarian of future societies."

In the meantime, couples might toss their calculators and flowcharts and enjoy the ride. It's short -- and, on good days, messy.