Women spend an hour longer doing housework than men – and Yorkshiremen are the worst

Women spend an hour longer doing housework than their male counterparts, with Yorkshiremen shirking the most responsibility, a study has found.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) data on how adults spend their time reveals the average number of minutes spent on different activities each day, including paid work, personal care, unpaid childcare, entertainment and more.

On average women do around three and a half hours of housework each day, compared with men who do just two hours and 35 minutes.

The domestic labour imbalance was greatest in Yorkshire and the Humber where women put in three hours and 56 minutes of work, a full hour and 21 minutes more than men in the area.

Men in the West Midlands were found to be most attentive, putting in three hours and nine minutes of drudgery, just 22 minutes less than women.

The gender gap for chores was widest among families with children under the age of 18. Fathers in this category did on average one hour and 43 minutes of unpaid work a day, while mothers contributed two hours and 46 minutes.

Stay-at-home mothers typically did 50 minutes extra work a day. However working mothers still spent nearly an hour more on household chores than fathers.

Britons love watching TV

The study also found that Britons spend almost five times as much time watching television as socialising.

Apart from sleeping and working, adults spend almost five times as much time watching television as socialising, the figures show.

On average, they spend two hours and 20 minutes watching TV every day, compared to just 31 minutes socialising.

The rest of their time is spent on other activities including preparing and eating food (one hour and 55 minutes), washing, dressing and grooming (55 minutes), and cleaning (27 minutes).

Figures changed radically since pandemic

While the figures are similar to last year – two hours and 16 minutes watching television, and 33 minutes socialising – they have changed radically since the pandemic struck in 2020.

The average time socialising is up more than threefold since April that year, when the survey was initially conducted in the middle of the first Covid lockdown. Just eight minutes a day of socialising was recorded then, increasing to a fairly consistent 30 minutes since.

Similarly, the time spent watching TV has also declined, from three hours to two hours and 20 minutes over the same period.

Ellys Monahan, of the ONS, said: “Today’s findings shed light on the large amount of unpaid work adults in the UK do. Things like unpaid childcare, cleaning, and cooking adds a lot of value to the country but is not counted by standard economic measures such as GDP. These data will help us better understand this contribution.”