Guys -------- Did you do your chores?

                                  This Mother's Day, we have some good news and some bad news for women on the housework front.
                                   Good news : Women do 1 hour, 45 minutes less daily housework now than they did in 1965, down from 4 hours then to less than 2 1/2 hours now, according to Liana Sayer of the University of Maryland.
                                  The amount of time men spend on housework has tripled, primarily from time spent doing "core" household chores, like cooking, cleaning and laundry.  Way to step up, guys!
                                  Women's housework time fell primarily because more women joined the labor force.  More time at work means less time on chores at home.  But women still do about 1.7 times as much housework as men.
                                  This is a far cry from 1965, when women did 6.8 times as much work as men, but clearly there's room for improvement.
                                   Bad news : Even when there's nobody around to pick up after them, men don't spend a lot of time on housework, according to Sayer.  Single women with no children do nearly twice as much cooking, cleaning and laundry as single men with no children.
                                   Another wrinkle in this narrative comes from Jill Yavorsky, Claire Kamp Dush and Sarah J. Schoppe-Sullivan at Ohio State University.  In a paper released they observe that the birth of a child radically alters the housework dynamic for well-educated married couples where both spouses work.
                                  Before he's a dad, the average man in such couples spends three hours more per week than his wife doing paid work and housework combined.  Once they're parents, his wife's combined weekly workload is 8.5 hours more than his.