The Steps That Actually Work to Improve Household Inequality

How to tell if your partner really wants equality--and what to do to make equality a reality

I’ve written extensively about how household chore inequality is a choice that men make day after day. They know what they’re doing. The problem is not the woman’s bad communication or failure to educate her husband. It’s not that men can’t see dirt, or that the same people who are perfectly competent at work somehow lack executive functioning skills only at home.

It’s that the man is choosing inequality because he benefits from it.

This is the critical insight missing from most writing on the topic. Women’s work is valuable. It improves men’s lives. It enables them to earn more, do more, sleep more. And if a man does not see his partner as an equal, if he does not value her well-being, then an equal household is a worse deal for him. So he’ll fight to keep inequality.

Men like that are not going to change. They’re not worth staying with. But what if your partner truly does care about equality? Maybe his parents didn’t teach him about home maintenance and he really does want to learn to do better. Then there’s hope. So let’s talk about some simple strategies for improving inequality.

But first, how can you tell if your partner is truly open to change, or just pretending he’s willing? It starts with assessing whether you have a cycle of abuse in your relationship.

Normally, the cycle of inequality goes something like this:

1. The build of inequity: The woman starts out doing a little more, and then does progressively more and more and more until inequity is undermining her quality of life.

2. Gaslighting: The man uses gaslighting to maintain access to a servant. He’ll tell her that she’s just better at certain tasks, try to convince her that she’s not actually doing more work than him, dismiss the value of her contribution, or claim that because he works more/earns more outside the home than she does, she has to do everything. For most women, this works quite well, because mom-guilt convinces us we deserve nothing and that our needs and time are less important.

3. Confrontation: At some point, the woman confronts the man about inequity—usually with great trepidation, fearing that a confrontation will undermine the relationship. This is because most men use anger to enforce inequity and maintain access to a servant.

4. False promises: If the woman is lucky, able to stand her ground, and her partner is not an overt abuser, he may promise to do better. He won’t make amends, won’t make any attempt to compensate her for the time and resources and opportunities she has lost, and will not be terribly interested in spending a lot of time talking about specifics. This, critically, is how you’ll know your male partner’s promises of change are false.

5. Sexist tropes: The man might take on a few extra tasks for a while, but things will never be truly equal. At best, he’ll continue with these small extra tasks. More likely, he’ll fall off the wagon quickly. When the woman confronts him, he will accuse her of nagging him, leaning hard on the sexist trope of the wife as a whiny, hyper-emotional nag. He’ll play the victim. He’s trying so hard and she doesn’t even thank him (never mind that he doesn’t thank her for doing much more and trying much harder)! He can’t take any more of her nagging! It’s abusive! How very dare she? He’s suffering. On and on until she backs down.

6. Claim poor mental health: At this point, he may claim that he is depressed, overwhelmed, anxious, just so stressed. Because of all she asks of him, how ungrateful she is, how she never acknowledges his contribution, blah blah blah. This is a tool designed to obscure the fact that she is still doing significantly more, and that it is her mental health—not his—that is most likely affected by household inequity. He will either actually succeed in convincing her that things are unfair and she needs to do more. Or she’ll be so desperate to get him to stop acting like an asshole that she’ll take on even more.

7. Become aggressive: In the rare event that she does not volunteer to take on more, or she takes steps to leave him, he will become aggressive—often physically so.

The cycle repeats again at this point, except this time she takes on even more because she’s learned that the consequences of asking for help are massive, and may include abuse, financial insecurity, and an unstable or dangerous environment for her children.

If she ends up with mental health problems as a result of the unbearable load and the abuse that enables it, he’ll use those as a tool of manipulation, too: look how crazy and unreasonable you are; stop being so negative; you’re making me unhappy. We see inequity on full display here: His mental health is her problem and her responsibility. Her mental health is her own problem, a tool of gaslighting, and a sign she is unworthy of help.

If this is the cycle in your relationship, please get out. But if it’s not, here are some strategies that can help bring you closer to equality without having to constantly make lists and plead for support.

A small caveat: The dominant culture affects us all. Even men who are committed to equality may occasionally display some of these behaviors. If your partner apologizes and corrects course, and if this cycle is not his primary model of managing household inequality, there may still be hope.

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