Why men need to clean, dust, and vacuum

To some, the title of this article seems obvious.  Of course men should assume their rightful duties and help with everyday household chores.  Not so fast dust pan breath! The reality is that household chores are not evenly split, especially among the over 65 age group.  Given this horrendous travesty of domicile justice, what does this possibly have to do with health?  Besides the obvious potential trauma from a disgruntled spouse, it turns out that an imbalance in domestic duties can reflect in poorer health consequences, especially for senior citizens.

Those crazy Brits at the University of Oxford did a study where they analyzed the activities of 35,000 men and women in seven countries, all over 65, and attempted to correlate those activities with various health outcomes. More specifically, the team looked at how much time the adults spent on 41 different activities each day, including cooking, cleaning, shuffleboard, mountain climbing, and other household chores, and how these affected overall health, which was self-reported.  What was interesting about this study is that they focused on domestic chores (okay, I made up the mountain climbing). The scientists looked at how time spent on household activities varies between older men and women — something they say has never before been investigated.

I suspect they had to use this cohort of people because in today’s enlightened society, everyone knows that millennials share home chores equally and marital bliss is far advanced over their aged parents and grandparents.  You see, the over 65 crowd is obviously stuck in the Neanderthal age of women being barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen and men smoking cigars and killing brontosauruses for fun and profit.  Is my sarcasm biting enough?  Anyway, what they found was that in this cohort indeed there was a discrepancy in the amount of hours spent on domestic duties between men and women. 

The study revealed that older men engaged in 3.1 hours of household activities per day, while older women spent almost 4.7 hours daily on housework — almost 2 hours more every day.  So what?, you may speculate. It turns out that less housework was associated with poor health status among both genders.

They surmise that the more housework that one did, the better your health outcomes, as long as it didn’t interfere with sleep.  If  your bride was up past midnight doing laundry, all health benefits went out the window.  So the take home message is that old folks need to split up the chores, get adequate rest, and stop watching so much darn Murder She Wrote.