Study Reportedly Finds Women Do More Housework Even in Retirement

Whenever someone asks why you’re a feminist, you can bring up this study. It turns out that years of fighting for their own rights has done nothing for elderly women, who still wind up doing the majority of the housework. Why? Who knows. But actually, a recent study has proved that these women may actually be in a better position because of their handiness in the house.

The Leibniz Institute for Prevention Research and Epidemiology has carried out a study that proves we should all be getting up and doing housework every now and then. When they looked at retired men and women in the U.S and Europe, they found that those who did more housework benefited enormously from it.

On average, the retired women who were studied spent around five hours of their daily routine on housework. Men, on the other hand, only managed to do three hours each, which is almost half the amount of time women spend on housework. The worst part is, it doesn’t even come as a surprise.

While women seem to be doing all the heavy lifting at home – literally when they have to hoover under the couch! – they are seemingly reaping the benefits from it. Housekeeping can be tiring and use up a lot of energy, but for retired older women, this keeps them fit and active. For this reason, the retired women in the study reported feeling healthier than the men did.

The author of this study, Nicholas Adjei, claims that a few hours of housework a day is healthy and will keep you fit and active in older age. With life expectancy growing with each generation, finding ways to prolong life doesn’t seem so necessary, but if doing a little housework keeps you going, where’s the harm in making it a part of your daily routine?

However, overdoing it will have the opposite effect, especially on older women. Those among the participants who strained themselves and didn’t tend to sleep much were more likely to have low levels of health.

Read How sleeping on time can do wonders for your health.

But this may not be as black and white as it seems. When studying countries outside of the US, it was found that there was a difference in the type of household chores depending on gender.

Men tended to be given more manual jobs than women, such as gardening and completing maintenance work around the house. On the other hand, daily tasks such as cleaning and cooking often fell on the women’s shoulders, meaning they performed domestic jobs on a more regular basis.

It may also be that culture serves a place in the amount of household work women engage in. While women in the US did around four hours of domestic work each day on average, women in Germany and Italy often did up to five. Perhaps it may depend on where you are and who you are as to how much housework you do, but if you’re the domestic goddess of the house, you can rest easy knowing you’re better off for it!

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Hayley Anderton

Hayley Anderton is a Creative Writing graduate from Liverpool. She’s a freelance writer and the self-published novelist of the LGBT YA book, Double Bluff. She doesn’t go anywhere without a notepad and has been writing ever since she can remember. Her other interests include baking, talking about politics and feminism, and snuggling up with her cat. She has dreams of traveling the world with her best friends, and of being a well-known author someday.