According to a new sociological study, couples who stick to gender segregated housework have more sex than couples who don’t.
In other words, husbands who stick to traditionally ‘male’ household jobs such as gardening and fixing the car have more sex than men who helped their wives with ‘female’ tasks such as cooking, cleaning and shopping.
Sociologists from the University of Washington in the United States found that on average couples jointly spent 34 hours a week on traditionally female jobs and 17 hours a week on tasks generally considered to belong to the man’s domain.
Typically, husbands did about one-fifth of the household’s ‘female’ chores and just over half of ‘male’ household work.
On average the couples said they had sex about five times in the month before they were questioned for the study.
However, those in marriages where the wife did all the traditionally female tasks reported having had sex about 1.6 times more per month than those where the husband did all the ‘feminine’ jobs.
One of the study’s authors, Sabino Kornrich warned that husbands should not take the findings as an excuse for not helping with the cooking and cleaning, saying that could “increase conflict in their marriage and lower their wives’ marital satisfaction”.
Julie Brines, another of the authors, said: “The results show that gender still organizes quite a bit of everyday life in marriage.
“In particular, it seems that the gender identities husbands and wives express through the chores they do also help structure sexual behaviour.”
She added: “Sex and housework are still key aspects of sharing a life, and both are related to marital satisfaction and how spouses express their gender identity.”