It's no secret that women tend to carry the lion's share of work around the home when it comes to domestic chores. Studies have shown that if stay at home moms were to earn a salary based on everything they do, they'd earn upwards of $160,000 per year. You may think that women only do more chores when they are the stay-at-home parent, but you'd be wrong. In fact, a new study is proving that even when women are the breadwinners in the family, they are still carrying more of the chore load than their partners who are making less money.

In a study published in the Journal of Family and Marriage, researchers found that whoever controls and manages the household finances typically influences the division of labor between men and women in the household. The study found the despite recent advancements in gender equality, women are still spending "substantially more time on housework than their male counterparts."

"Housework provides a window into the ‘checks and balances’ of power and gender in couple relationships," author of the study, Dr. Yang Hu, stated. In this study, Dr. Hu and his team looked at two waves of the United Kingdom Household Longitudinal Study conducted from 2010-2012 and 2012-2014. After being vetted, the study looked at 6,070 couples who were either living together or married and were between the ages of 20 and 59. The study asked the couples about their weekly routine including housework, how much each member of the household earned and how they managed their finances.

The study found that women spent more than twice as much time on housework, such as cooking, cleaning, and laundry than men. It also showed that men often used money as a means of not doing housework. If men controlled the finances in the household they would often withhold money from women, resulting in the need for bargaining (often resulting in the woman doing more work) or by making women solely responsible for the household finances.

"Men get away with not doing housework through both channels," Hu explained, according to Fatherly. "It puts women in a very compromising position as they are left to do the lion’s share of housework."

While women who control their own finances, such as having their own, independent bank account, tend to have more equality in the home when it comes to chores, Hu states that "the research clearly demonstrates the need to move beyond wage and earnings to explore the important role played by intrahousehold financial organization in the relationship between money and marital power."

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