Friday 8 January 201612.00 GMTLast modified on Friday 8 January 201612.01 GMT

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[size=68]Afortnight ago, I received the following [url=http:// https//twitter.com/MollieBoss/status/679688570823688193]tweet[/url]: “Husband casually mentioned today he has never cleaned our bathroom – it’s always me! How did I miss that for 31 years?!”Apart from chortling at one response (“you were too busy cleaning the bathroom!”), the thing that struck me about the tweet was just how much it resonated with my own experiences and those I had heard from other women.
Even among feminist friends and forward-thinking families, it’s fascinating to see how our insistence on gender equality in every other area of life sometimes falters before the stubborn persistence of gendered chores. This goes both for the type of tasks (who does the laundry and washes up? Who takes out the bins?) and the quantity of time spent doing them. A recent BBC survey found that women spend twice as much time on chores as men, devoting well over the equivalent of one working day per week to household duties. And a Mumsnet survey of 1,000 working mothers found that only 5% of men took responsibility for giving the house a weekly clean, compared with 71% of women. The stark division in unpaid labour also encompasses childcare – from who looks after children at weekends to who is expected to take time off when children are sick – and persists even in surveys of heterosexual couples where the male partner doesn’t have a job. Among same-sex couples, some studies have suggested that there islikely to be a fairer division of chores, while others seem to suggest there is still a somewhat “gendered” division of labour, with the lower-earning partner tending to take on chores traditionally considered “women’s work”, such as cooking.
The extra burden usually taken on by women in heterosexual couples also includes “emotional labour”, such as keeping on top of a child’s progress at school, checking in with elderly relatives and organising social events, adding to the so-called “second shift” millions of women work, often without thanks or acknowledgement. Many would argue that the reason the divide has persisted so long is because it is unimportant – as long as you maintain a healthy, respectful relationship, you might ask, who cares who does the DIY or cleans the loo?
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But the division of chores plays into myriad other problems, from the assumption that women are better suited to caring professions, to the patronising depiction of men as oafish and stupid in cleaning adverts, to the struggle for shared parental leave. Recently, it was even suggested that women’s shouldering of extra domestic work alongside full-time employment might be contributing to the slowing growth pace of female life expectancy!

Of course, in many families men do help, or do their fair share of the chores, but such stereotypes can still be insidious in forming young people’s ideas about the world and the importance of men and women’s time. You can see these ideas reflected later on, in issues such as the expectation that women will always make the tea in the workplace, the idea that a woman is “lucky” if her partner helps out with “babysitting” his own children, or the societal pressure for women to sacrifice career for childrearing. The impact is startlingly wide.
To get people thinking about the issue, Everyday Sexism, human rights organisation Breakthrough and the writer and activist Soraya Chemaly have teamed up to create the 2016 #ChoreChallenge. The project encourages households to take note of the chores being done over the next two weeks and then attempt to “gender swap” some or all of them (children’s tasks included) over the next year. Participants can share their experiences and progress using the hashtag #ChoreChallenge on social media, or add them to Breakthrough’s storytelling platform The G Word, using the same hashtag. There will also be a global #ChoreChallenge Twitter chat on Tuesday 12 January at 2pm GMT.
Even the most forward-thinking among us might be surprised, after stopping to add it up, about just what is going on inside our own homes.[/size]