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Some applications emulate enterprise software. Maple founder Michael Perry says his workplace-inspired apps like Slack and Trello put tasks in a “trash area” where family members can choose via chat without having to authorize a single person.

Other approaches draw their inspiration from research on domestic inequality. Rachel Drapper, a research associate at Harvard Business School, is working to integrate research into how couples can split household chores more successfully into the upcoming FairShare app. “Many solutions target women, and we thought this missed the point,” she says. Drapper’s solution – which is still a prototype – is to crowdsource data on how households divide their work and use the results to inform other households about what is working and what is not.

The problem is, these practices face an extremely difficult task as they try to overturn deeply rooted societal norms: girls play with their moms in the kitchen, boys play with their dads. Such expectations are part of what leaves women in heterosexual couples to do most of the housework (same-sex couples are noticeably more egalitarian). When women become mothers, the imbalance gets worse.

Still, that’s not the point if Men can play an equal role in housework, but How. Men in more egalitarian cultures, unsurprisingly, get a much fairer share. And in these places, the government itself can come to its aid if both partners do not have the time or energy. which in Sweden tops Gender Equality Index in the EU, The government pays half of the bill. for renting chores like doing laundry and cleaning the house – which means much busier families can afford it. This helps women’s earning potential. In Belgium, a similar state subsidy to outsource jobs led to a significant increase in female employment.

However, in the United States, many women, mother or not, are at a crisis point with little in the way of safety nets such as affordable or subsidized childcare or healthcare.

papering on inequalities

One reason practices have had a hard time making a serious dent in women’s housework burden is that much of the labor women do is mental and emotional, not physical. Allison Daminger, a PhD student in sociology at Harvard, says the burden of anticipating the needs of those around them and making day-to-day decisions for the family still falls mostly on women. These tasks may include researching the best offer for a sofa or remembering when it’s time for a child to go to the dentist. It is a time-consuming task, even if it is mostly hidden from others.

Housework app design regularly further burys the status quo: women who often hand over chores. “I can’t think of a time [in my research] Where a man makes a list for his wife, but I can think of a few examples where a wife makes a list for her husband,” says Daminger.

Jaclyn Wong, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of South Carolina, is not just an expert on the role of gender expectations in couple dynamics. She also manages her own app, a chore schedule that tries to avoid sexist traps by dividing all housework between both partners (women do the cooking, men do the gardening). She also aims to write down exactly what each person does.

Chapman Clark says that making invisible labor visible in this way is a huge benefit from using the drudgery practice. “It helped me realize when my husband was contributing, and it helped my husband realize that there is so much more housework than just vacuuming, vacuuming, cooking and dishes,” she says.

But not everyone likes to see this discrepancy between a couple’s contributions. Wong’s research shows that this is a tough battle: “There is a turnaround. “People get defensive when they are informed that they are not equal partners.” The risk is that couples abandon a practice because of it, even if it may help them in the long run.

While apps are easy to access and use, they often seem to write down gender inequalities in the home on paper. In fact, they can hurt relationships if they are seen as a “management tool” rather than a “partnership tool,” says Kate Mangino, author of an upcoming book. Equal Partnerson how to improve gender equality in households.

Expressing how a husband can feel, Mangino says, “One of the ways we justify gender inequality is ‘He’s the manager and I’m the helper’”. It creates a strange power dynamic powered by apps.

The most important thing to the success of an app is that it is bought by the less-than-doing partner, and that’s impossible to guarantee. “The job of running the app will still be seen as a women’s job,” Wong says. “We created these norms where women and mothers have the last word.”

Ultimately, a chore practice can only do so much to get a reluctant partner to step in and undo centuries of sexism. It can help make who is doing what around the house more visible, but a couple cannot change the situation unless both members accept the need for change and this remains the biggest hurdle.

“Often [chore app] entrepreneurs and the feedback I almost always give is, ‘How are you going to get men involved?’” says Daminger. “This is the biggest hurdle and I don’t know anyone who broke it.”