Yet another study on American family life shows that the more time fathers spend at work, the more time children at home spend on household chores. The study was produced by Contance Gager, of Montclair State University's department of family and child studies, and appears in the November issue of The Journal of Family.

Gager finds that "for each extra hour a father spends at work, his children do two more minutes of housework a week on average. That relationship between parental time at work and a child's time on chores does not hold true, however, for mothers. (There were 3,560 families in the study.)"

It's easy to tear this study apart, and I note its infirmities first before I lay out below the potential effect it could be having on women's advancement in society. The study stretches its own credibility thin when it points out that a child does "one or two" more minutes of housework each week (how can that even be calculated correctly?) for each extra hour worked by fathers. And how can one base a solid conclusion on an incremental increase of time spent by children on household chores?

That aside, New York Times blogger Lisa Belkin makes an assertion about these findings that, if true, could explain a question that continues to loom large for career women -- why have we not made the kind of progress we were hoping to make (in the corporate world, in politics and in the arts) by now?

Belkin writes, "Gager's journal article does not speculate on why this is true, but my theory is that mothers are more likely to see home and hearth as their responsibility, and to feel guilty if they have to dole out "their job" to their children. Fathers, on the other hand, are less likely to carry that societal expectation, or that guilt." (http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/kids-picking-up-the-slack)

I would go even further and say that some (not all) women not only see home and hearth as their responsibility but are positively territorial about performing all the housework and child care. If they give any of that up, they fear their husbands/men might no longer support them.

To this niche demographic, giving up any of the cooking or cleaning or household errands or childcare puts them in the perilous position of not having a reason for being. While insisting on performing these responsibilities, they teach the next generation that housework is women's work.

Their boys learn by osmosis that dad's place is in the work world, and mom's (and by inference, all women's) place is in the home. The downside of this is that when children are raised in this fashion, they take their personal experiences out into the real world. They become bosses who are less likely to promote women workers (because they conclude they will ultimately quit work to raise a family.) They become parents who perpetuate these stereotypes.

This is anecdotal, of course, but I've had so many female friends complain about their husbands/partners failing to pick up a fair share of the housework and child care. I ask, "Why won't he do his fair share?" The typical response is, "I can't get him to do anything, so I do it myself."

Then I ask why the wife didn't choose instead to marry a man who would do his fair share. Again, the typical response is that such men do not exist or the woman in question couldn't wait any longer to get married since she wanted children and her biological clock was running.

The truth is that until women flat out refuse to have children with old-fashioned men, these stereotypes will be perpetuated. And the worst part of that is, some women actually prefer it that way.

n Bonnie Erbe is a TV host and writes this column for Scripps Howard News Service. E-mail bonnieerbe@CompuServe.com

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