Housework is female: This is how unequal the distribution of roles is in Austria

In a survey of 1,000 Austrians commissioned by the household appliance manufacturer Vorwerk, 70 percent of women felt responsible for cleaning their own homes. For 23 percent of the men surveyed, a clean car was even more important than a clean home, according to a press release.

• Also read: In Austrian households, women still clean, men repair

Among the men, only around a third (35 percent) of those surveyed felt responsible for cleaning. There was no difference between the generations. The male representatives of Gen Z are just as lazy when it comes to cleaning as their baby boomer counterparts. “The unequal distribution of housework in Austrian families is unfortunately no big surprise. However, the fact that no difference can be seen between the generations is very surprising,” said Philipp Kammerer from Vorwerk.

One in three is heavily burdened

The fact that housework is largely in the hands of women also means that women are burdened more. While almost a quarter of the men surveyed (23 percent) found the burden of daily housework to be very high to fairly high, more than one in three women (36 percent) found it to be the same. When it came to the popularity of cleaning, women and men were in agreement for once: 60 percent of those surveyed (64 percent men, 55 percent women) do not like cleaning at all. Almost three quarters of women (73 percent) said they clean alone, while 46 percent of the men surveyed only do it together with their partner.

Cooking as the most popular household activity

But not everything about housework is bad: the most popular household activity among Austrians in the survey was cooking (42 percent), followed by vacuuming (30 percent).