family

Reading the stories by so many moms about how they have been discriminated against at the workplace is unsettling at best and horrifying at worst, but it’s not surprising.

If we want to understand the wage gap between mothers and others, we might need to start by looking at the way we treat our kids. A new University of Michigan study, as reported in the Wall Street Journal, reports that boys ages 10 to 18 are more likely than girls to be paid for doing housework, even though boys spend an average of 30% less time doing chores.

According to the WSJ, Professor Frank Stafford, who headed the resrarch, speculates that "Boys may be handling more of the kinds of chores that are regarded as a job that should be paid, such as lawnmowing. Chores such as dishwashing or cooking, often regarded as routine and done free, may fall more often to girls."