Ironing: The UK’s Most Unpopular Household Chore?:
“There are boy jobs and girl jobs”. This was the opinion expressed by a British Prime Minister, not in the 17th or 18th century, but on BBC TV’s “The One Show” in May 2017 during an interview with the then PM, Theresa May and her husband Philip, who confirmed that he’s assigned the “traditional boy jobs”, such as putting out the bins.
The programme provoked considerable media discussion as to whether Mrs May had been guilty of sexism and her husband was “henpecked”, with the polemical TV presenter, Piers Morgan (who recently left ITV’s “Good Morning Britain” show after criticising Meghan Markle) publicly promising his wife he’d follow Mr May’s example. The YouGov market research organisation subsequently conducted a survey on whether men these days “do their fair share of the housework”. The results indicated that 54% of women say that it’s mostly they who tidy up the bathroom, attend to 
the laundry, do the dusting (52%) and polishing of surfaces (50%) in addition to the oven cleaning, bed-making, mopping and cooking.
However, 36% of women don’t undertake any of the gardening and 25%
leave it to their partner to put out the rubbish – possibly because, according to the Statista contributor, Niall McCarthy, it’s the third most unpopular household chore, with doing the ironing at the top of the “least liked” list for 50% of those questioned. Washing the dishes, by contrast, tends to be a joint effort among 73% of UK couples, as does food shopping and hoovering.
On the 26th August, both the London Evening Standard and the Daily Mirror highlighted an investigation by the Indesit / Whirlpool appliance company into the domestic repercussions of the pandemic which revealed that 60% of couples in Britain admit they have “set” tasks despite considering “pink” and “blue” jobs to be an outdated concept . The Mirror correspondent, 
Charlotte Minett, quoted the Indesit spokesperson, Charmaine Warner, as acknowledging that “it does appear these cliches are still around in our society, without us really noticing”- hence men are invariably the ones responsible for washing the car, cutting the grass, unclogging plugholes and replacing lightbulbs, albeit that descaling the shower, looking after pets and steaming the carpet are equally shared between members of the household.
The Scottish Sun columnist, Adrian Hearn, nonetheless, was encouraged by the fact the responses from the 2,000 UK adults who participated in the Indesit study showed that far more families are now “pitching in with household chores” than was the case before the first lockdown. Furthermore, although the gap in the UK between the male and female share of the housework (49% – 85%) is greater than in Sweden and Denmark, it is significantly less than in Spain, France,Germany, Austria, Italy, Hungary and Greece, where (as specified by the Statista analyst Martin Armstrong) “the 85% of the women who fulfil the majority of the drudgery around the home get assistance from a mere 16% of their husbands or partners”.
An evaluation of “Social Stratification and Mobility” in Britain published by the London School of Economics on March 8th nonetheless expressed concern that the first covid-19 lockdown in particular had “confirmed the gendered division of domestic chores”. As pointed out by BBC News, the UK
Government in January was obliged to hastily withdraw a social media advert urging people to “Stay Home. Save Lives” after it was criticised for stereotyping women. It had displayed three scenes showing women cleaning, ironing and teaching children while the only man featured was depicted relaxing on a sofa. The Government rejected any imputation that this reflected a lingering adherence to old-fashioned social attitudes
On 26th November, UN Women published new global data suggesting that the pandemic could wipe out 25 years of increasing gender equality. “Everything we’ve achieved”, UN Women Deputy Executive Director, Anita Bhatia, told the BBC’s Sandrine Lungumbu and Amelia Butterly, “could be lost in a year”. Even before coronavirus, she declared, women were having to bear the burden of around 75% of the 16 billion hours of unpaid work carried out each day around the world – a figure based on the findings from 38 national surveys focusing on lower and middle income countries. Now, 66% of women in the Philippines, for example, contend they are spending much more time on housework than before covid. In Indonesia, the proportion is 65%, in Mexico 48%, in Chile 76%.
Meanwhile, the commentator for India’s “SheThePeople” Women’s TV Channel, Anoushka Das, on February 9th reported that the police department in Mumbai has been inundated by men filing complaints that since the onset of the pandemic their wives have been putting pressure on them to contribute more to household duties.