Band 8.0 — Bar Chart: Weekly Hours of Housework by Gender in Five Countries

The bar chart compares the average number of hours per week that men and women devoted to unpaid housework in five countries.

Overall, women undertook more domestic work than men in every country surveyed, though the scale of the gender gap varied enormously, being widest in the two East Asian nations and narrowest in Sweden.

The imbalance was most pronounced in Japan and Korea. Japanese women spent 24 hours a week on household tasks, six times as long as Japanese men, who contributed a mere 4 hours. Korea presented an almost identical picture, with women doing 22 hours against men's 5.

The Western countries exhibited a more even, if still unequal, division of labour. Women in France and the United States each carried out roughly 17 to 18 hours of housework, around 70 to 80% more than their male compatriots. Sweden came closest to parity, where women averaged 15 hours and men 13, a difference of just 2 hours that made Swedish men the most domestically active of the five nationalities. Even there, however, full equality had yet to be reached.