Why Don’t Men Get It?
September 18th, 2019 Posted by Rabbi Daniel and Susan Lapin Ask the Rabbi 26 commentsHello Rabbi and Susan Lapin,
Thank you for all your useful teachings, which I enjoy on a daily basis.
I have another marriage question for you. It is interesting to me that while many women are, rightly or wrongly, the main breadwinners in their homes, they still continue to do more household tasks than their husbands do.
Why do you think men seem to be so unaware of the professional and domestic burdens their wives are assuming?
Anonymous
Dear Anonymous,
We’re delighted that you find our writings valuable and regret that we cannot answer your question just as you asked it. In order to do so, we would have to agree to be constrained by the corner in which you are painting us.
You are making several assumptions in the way you phrase your question. We, too, have read surveys that show that women do more household chores than men. We have read other surveys that show an increasing number of families where wives out-earn their husbands. We’re not sure we have seen any accurate studies showing the overlap between these two sub-groups of families and that drill down into relevant details of these families. There may well be some studies like that, but our first instinct when we see studies on just about any politically hot-potato topic is to ascertain how objective and statistically accurate they are. Very few meet this reasonable standard.