Unequal Chore Division Is Killing Women's Sex Drives, Research Shows

You’re probably familiar with this story: Man and woman meet, fall in love, have fabulous sex. They move in, maybe get married, maybe have kids. Her interest in sex starts to drop; his doesn’t. Tension ensues, spoken or unspoken. He’s always initiating; she’s always turning him down.

While that narrative actually isn’t as universal as many people make it out to be (more on that in a minute), some research has shown that women are indeed more likely than men to experience a decrease in sexual desire over time in long-term relationships.

In the study, psychology researchers Emily A. Harris, Ph.D., Aki Gormezano, Ph.D., and Sari van Anders, Ph.D., surveyed over 1,000 women currently in relationships with men, all of whom were living together and had kids. They asked questions about the women’s levels of sexual desire, the division of housework with their male partners, and how they felt about that division.

The results? Women who performed a larger proportion of the household labor had significantly lower desire for their partner, compared to women in relationships where the men were more involved at home. In other words, women were much more sexually excited by men who cooked, cleaned, and took charge with the kids.

Firstly, the study found that women shouldering more of the housework were also likely to perceive that dynamic as unfair—and that feeling of unfairness in the relationship was part of what was leading to lower desire for their partner.

This is important, the researchers note in the paper, because it refutes the argument that women take on more domestic tasks because they want to or because they simply enjoy caregiving. While that might be true for some, this study found women in imbalanced partnerships were actually often resentful of the situation. And it's pretty hard to be turned on by someone you kinda resent.

Secondly, the researchers found that women dealing with an imbalance at home were more likely to feel like their partner was dependent on them. That feeling—that is, feeling like your man relies on you to take care of him and perform basic life tasks for him—was the other factor associated with lower sexual desire.

As Harris and the team point out in the paper, doing someone’s laundry, cooking for them, cleaning up after them, and planning their social calendar are tasks people typically perform for children. So, when a woman has to perform these tasks for her husband with no real reciprocity or recognition, the relationship “more closely mirrors that of a mother and a child.”

Unsurprisingly, that’s not very sexy.

“The inequitable proportion of household labor may contribute to a burdensome blurring of mother and partner roles, whereby partners are perceived as recipients of caregiving, akin to dependent children,” they write. “As a result, women may experience lower desire for partners who are perceived in dependent-like ways.”

That common anecdote we mentioned up top—about the wife who is constantly rebuffing her husband’s sexual advances—is tied up with the idea that women are always or inherently less interested in sex than men are. It’s a popular narrative, though of course, reality is much more nuanced.

For one thing, you’ll find varying levels of sexual desire across all genders: Some women want lots of sex, some men can take it or leave it, and most people have libidos that regularly fluctuate depending on all the other things happening in their life. While different studies2 estimate anywhere from 10 to 55% of women deal with “low libido” compared to between 1 to 28% of men, some research3 on mixed-gender couples finds men are equally likely to be the lower-desire partner as women are.

The current study also offers another challenge to the idea that women just naturally lack interest in sex by demonstrating that women’s lower libido actually seems to be directly tied to the role they’re often relegated to in long-term, heteronormative relationships.

“Our findings challenge the assumption that low sexual desire in women is necessarily located in women, in their bodies or minds,” Harris and the research team write. “Instead, we find support for a socio-structural explanation for at least some considerable portion of low desire in women, whereby the system of heteronormativity brings about gender inequities in household labor that are associated with lower desire.”

So, what does this all mean for the average couple trying to navigate their home and sex life?

Particularly in relationships between men and women, prioritizing creating a fair division of housework is well worth the effort for many reasons. Studies like this one suggest that, in addition to creating a more functional, balanced partnership, addressing the inequities at home may also boost a woman's sexual desire.