How marriage became a bad deal for women

A lot of women, straight women, are giving up on dating, not because they don't want a date, or they don't want romance, or even because they're dissatisfied with the dates themselves, but because they're dissatisfied with how they're being treated in modern relationships. This is a recent economics paper titled, and I love this, "Winning the Bread and Baking up to." One of the things the authors found is that single women spend, on average, slightly more hours per week on housework than single men. But when they get married, women's time on housework grows to about double that of men's. If they have kids, it becomes triple or quadruple. And if you think, well, maybe that's because men are busy out making money, I've got some news for you. The study looked at how housework breaks down and opposite sex marriages where both partners work. In homes where the female-to-male wage ratio is between 0.25 and 0.5, and that is to say women make between one quarter and one half of what their husbands make, women spend just over twice as many hours per week on housework as their husband. And that's not so surprising, right? The husband earns more work, the wife works more at home. But let's see how that changes when we look at couples where the wage ratio is between 0.5 and one. In other words, where the wife earns anywhere from half her husband's salary to the same amount as him. These are their hours spent on housework. It's exactly the same as that other bar chart. She's making nearly the same salary as him, but still putting in twice as many hours at home. So, okay, let's look at what happens when that wage ratio pops up to between 1 and 2. Household where the wife makes more than her husband, like up to twice as much. Surely they're doing equal housework? Nope, it's the same again. Nothing changes. All right, last bar. Homes where the wife earns more than twice her husband's salary. These are the high-powered executives, corporate attorneys. There's no way they're coming home and scrubbing toilets while the husband plays video games, right? Yep, they are. Even the women who literally financially support their husbands, they still do all the housework. There's a lot of play here, but mostly it comes down to social expectations. Married women are still expected to perform all the duties of a 1950s housewife while now also holding down a career as demanding as their husbands. Getting married means they're workload doubling. And their husbands get in cut in half because now someone is bringing home a second salary and taking care of all the homework. So you can see why more and more women are asking why bother with the house updating at all? The end result is so in appealing. To me, the person who bests some this up is a writer and actually a former colleague of mine, we coached a podcast for a while named Aaron Ryan. She wrote, "Compared to being single, men see being married with children as beneficial. Women see being married with children as detrimental. Men want their father's lives, and women don't want their mothers.