Who does the housework? Five Guardian writers reveal all

Does any couple really split the chores straight down the middle? According to surveys for Mumsnet and Woman’s Hour released on Monday, working mums spend an average of 10 hours a week on household chores, while men chip in with just five hours a week. A survey of almost 1,000 working mothers found that, out of 54 common household tasks, women were chiefly responsible for 36 of them, 15 were shared by men and women, and just three were the preserve of men: changing lightbulbs, taking the bins out and DIY. We asked five Guardian writers to be honest about who does the dirty work in their homes …

Tim Dowling: ‘I tend to subcontract out chores to my children’

Let me just say this: it doesn’t feel like I’m doing nothing. I know I’m not pulling my full weight around the house – we probably spend more time arguing about housework than I do on housework. What’s worse, I work from home, so any housework not done by me has to be done around me. But there is no actual free time in my day – only stolen time.

I suppose I do about half the cooking. I rarely manage my corresponding half of the washing up, but I also tend to do my share of it first thing in the morning while the coffee is brewing, so I don’t get full credit. My wife will come down and point out unwiped spots, or utensils that remain in the sink. When it comes to the washing up, she’s a bit of a completist.

Much against my will, I find myself in charge of the bins and all the lightbulbs, and anything involving a ladder. I alone seem capable of putting a cover on a duvet. I am also summarily assigned certain chores during the week, the least challenging of which – feeding the dogs, etc – I tend to subcontract out to my children. I do enjoy the excitement of tackling a DIY project without really knowing what I’m doing, but I try not to let my enjoyment show.

I almost never use the vacuum cleaner – not unless I’ve created a catastrophic mess that I don’t want anyone to find out about. I often assist in moving laundry through the pipeline (transferring wet clothes to dryer, reloading washer, etc), particularly when I need something specific to come out the other end, but I admit I have no real understanding of the overarching system. I do at least know enough not to complain when it goes wrong.

I read somewhere that in the UK, men do about a third of the overall housework. That sounds a pretty generous assessment to me. I’ll take that.

Lucy Mangan: ‘We live perpetually on the edge of chaos’

I love the idea of being organised enough to have a list of allocated chores. If you’ve got that far, I think you’re already winning at life. In this house, Toryboy does the dishwasher – not correctly, not well, not before we’ve completely run out of kitchenware and are eating breakfast out of newspaper with our hands – but he does it. I do the cooking – not correctly, not well – but I do it. Everything else is tackled on an ad hoc basis according to what is currently presenting the greatest danger to our child – cholera from insanitary conditions, burial under the piles of crap teetering on the stairs, going to nursery naked because there are no clean clothes in the house – and by whoever has the least-looming deadline.

We have cleaners, from a firm that provides them with holiday pay, sick pay, pension payments and so on, to try to lessen my crippling guilt about employing someone to clean up my shit, but a) they are terrible and b) even if they weren’t, they could only do so much in a perennially messy house. My mother does at least two loads of laundry a week for me. The child and I eat over there twice a week. If we didn’t, we’d die. I don’t know how Toryboy manages. I don’t care, either, unless he starts doing the dishwasher properly.

We live perpetually on the edge of chaos. It’s exhausting, dispiriting, infuriating. I am permanently uncomfortable in my own home and racked with remorse for what is a practical and a moral failing.

Living in a clean and tidy house is my dream. I wake up meaning to achieve it every day, and go to bed every night crushed by my inability to achieve it. If I could afford to employ more people to help me, I would. If I could afford to give up work to have time to do it myself, I would. But, as things stand, I have to reckon things on the basis that it is better to have a shithole of a house than no house at all.

Hugh Muir: ‘The chores are a shared endeavour’

There are two things you need to know about growing up in a traditional West Indian household in the 1970s and 80s. One is that you learned to do chores. Not just the occasional chore. Not just a dinner table cleaned up after a family meal. Hardcore stuff. Window-cleaning, cupboard-cleaning, oven-cleaning, vacuuming (if you were lucky enough to have one – otherwise it was the dustpan and brush all the way up the stairs). You learned to cook, because Mum was off to church on Sunday and the rice and peas and roast potatos weren’t going to cook themselves. You learned to wash up. A dishwasher? Don’t make me laugh. You learned which liquid soaps really were kind to your hands. You learned to clean and re-lay the dirty, coal-heated, gas-fired boiler. There was no negotiation. You could drag your heels a bit, sulk, protest, but that made no sense because only on completion of the chores were you free to play football or ride bikes or chase girls.

The second thing to note is that there was the strictest age-based hierarchy. Thus, older siblings could subcontract their chores to the youngest. I was the youngest. No remuneration was involved.

So the chores are a shared endeavour in the Muir household. On alternate weeks my wife and I grab the hoover, grip the bucket laden with surface cleaners of all descriptions and assault the house from top to bottom. The children, having not been raised in a traditional West Indian household, watch the process with interest. Occasionally they complain about the noise made by the Hoover. The division of labour largely involves the distinction between wet and dry cleaning. My forte is scrubbing things. From scummy to clean in a second … instant gratification. With Miles Davis in the background; my version of therapy.

Hannah Marriott: ‘I don’t seem to have an antenna for housework’

I once made my boyfriend an unforgettable meal: a pallid omelette broken into fragments, a handful of cheesy Doritos and a mini Babybel. On seeing his reaction to this shiny, beige mess I laughed a little hysterically until, unexpectedly, the tears started to flow as I wondered how I had become so appalling at life.

My boyfriend is a brilliant cook: a smearer of butter, a sprinkler of salt, a marinader of meat. For him, a happy home is a full fridge and a trip to the supermarket is a pleasure – so it makes sense that he manages our food. What we are unsure of is what, exactly, I am in charge of in return.

I realise this is a shameful admission, but I just don’t seem to have an antenna for housework. I don’t notice overflowing bins and washing baskets until there is a weird smell or I have long run out of socks. My well-brought-up boyfriend, on the other hand, anticipates tasks before they have become a problem – so clothes washing and bin-emptying tend to fall under his remit, along with vacuuming, buying the milk, paying the bills and cleaning the loo.

In my defence, I am tidy. I will straighten up a room, make the bed and zhuzh up the cushions for – gosh – minutes. I also do about half of our paperwork and a lot of the washing up. But it’s not quite enough to break even, is it?

In response, my boyfriend sometimes initiates a passive protest and leaves the bins to overflow (unfortunately for him, I don’t usually notice). His other techniques are more effective: arguments – sometimes quite cross ones – negotiations, eye rolls, rewards, expressions of disappointment and exasperation. Consequently, I have started buying the odd pint of milk and cooking properly every now and then, which is just as well given that we are getting married next year – unless the housework gets us first.

Alexis Petridis: ‘Some jobs are divided along gender lines’

We have two young kids, we both work and we don’t have a cleaner, partly because of the expense and partly, I suspect, because I was brought up in a house where having a cleaner was held to be an early step on the irreversible path to abominable decadence: one minute you’re paying someone to do your vacuuming; the next thing you know, you’re spending your every waking hour sprawled in a pitiful opiated haze, weakly quoting Baudelaire while dressed like Mick Jagger in 1967. Worse, having a cleaner was somehow thought to be symbolic of not really being clean. Having a cleaner was something southerners did, and it seemed to be a bizarre article of faith that southerners had a disturbingly lax attitude to domestic hygiene. Once you got past Watford Gap, they were apparently all sitting around knee-deep in dust and detritus, like Quentin Crisp, while their cleaners … actually, I’m not quite sure what their cleaners were supposed to be doing.

So we do the housework ourselves, which under the circumstances means a division of labour: nothing set in stone, we don’t have a rota, but it seems to work itself out. It is a matter of who is around to do it. At the moment, my wife works part-time, so she does the majority, a state of affairs that has brought with it her faintly worrying tendency to carry on as if vacuuming and dusting are an arcane dark art, the secret of which has been exclusively revealed to her: if I get involved I’m only going to cock it up, like the sorceror’s apprentice calling spirits only the master understands. But it wasn’t ever thus, and it won’t be in the future.

There are jobs that seem to be divided along traditional gender lines. I go to the tip and bleed the radiators and indulge in a kind of feeble pantomime where I pretend to know what’s wrong with the car before taking it to the garage. My wife cooks more than me, a hangover from when we first met and I was pathetically incapable of cooking anything without poisoning someone or causing a small fire or having some kind of nervous breakdown in the process.