A lot of straight women are giving up on dating—not because they don’t want romance, but because they’re dissatisfied with how they’re being treated in modern relationships.
There’s a recent economics paper titled Winning the Bread and Baking It Too that helps explain why.
The Numbers Tell a Clear Story
The study found that single women spend only 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. And if they have kids, it becomes triple or quadruple.
You might think, “Well, maybe that’s because men are busy out making money.” But the data says otherwise.
The researchers looked at opposite-sex marriages where both partners work. Among couples where the wife earns between one-quarter and one-half of what her husband makes, women spend just over twice as many hours on housework as their husbands.
When the wife earns half to the same amount as her husband—same pattern. When she earns up to twice as much—nothing changes. Even when the wife earns more than twice her husband’s salary—the high-powered executives, the corporate attorneys—they’re still coming home and doing all the housework. Even the women who financially support their husbands still do all the housework.
Why Does This Happen?
It comes down to social expectations. Married women are still expected to perform all the duties of a 1950s housewife while also holding down a career as demanding as their husbands’. Getting married means their workload doubles while their husband’s gets cut in half—because now someone is bringing home a second salary and still taking care of all the home work.
The Marriage Paradox
As one writer put it: “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 mother’s.”
So you can see why more and more women are asking: why bother with the hassle of dating at all?
