Hubbies and Housework: Glass Half-Full?

Man, I try to stay the heck away from the housework stuff, partly because I'm just not sure that it has direct relevance to the bigger issues of fatherhood and partly because its just not something that I do a particularly good job with, personally.

But I figure I ought to flag new research from the University of Michigan that charts the amount of housework that men and women are doing and compares that to figures from three decades ago. Depending on your point of this, the results are either good news on the gender-equity front or proof that guys are still nowhere close to where we need to be.

The press release takes the dim view, noting in the first sentence that "having a husband creates an extra seven hours of housework for women," which is clearly *not* cool. But looking at the stats shows that married women are doing a lot less cleaning up than they were doing 30 years ago (17 hours a week, down from 26) and men are doing a lot more (13 hours a week, up from 6). And guys are increasingly doing more housework once married than they did when they were single.

What's the conclusion when you shake all of this out? I have no idea, beyond my firm belief that 13 hours of housework is still too much. For anyone.