Domestic responsibilities help men balance their lives and ultimately make them feel happier according to a recent study conducted by sociologists in Europe.
Researchers examined men in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany , France and Britain by way of the regular European Social Survey.
Each male participant in the European Social Survey was asked a set of standard questions to measure their happiness, for example whether they felt “fulfilled” in life or if they woke up feeling refreshed. Each male participant was then asked to measure their levels of “work-life conflict.”
Afterwards researchers compared the answers men and women gave and then compared those answers to how they spend time on various tasks such as cooking, shopping, DIY projects, etc.
Researchers had hoped to prove that when men shoulder most of the burden women are happier, what they found instead was that the men who handled more chores were happier but their wives and girlfriends stayed at the same happiness level.
Prof Jacqueline Scott, professor of empirical sociology at Cambridge tells the Telegraph:
“There were really good reasons from the literature for thinking that it would be women who really benefited if the men did more but that is not what we found and that is what is interesting.
“I think that really is because by and large women have taken it for granted that they would have to do a double shift.
“It is not that their wellbeing rises if he is doing more on this measure.”
Why do you think men are happier when they handle at least part of the household chores?
