STUDY LINKS WOMEN’S HOUSEWORK LOAD TO LOWER DESIRE

Researchers who studied household labor and desire in 1,130 women partnered with men found that the more housework a woman did compared with her partner, the less desire she reported for him. Emily A. Harris, Aki M. Gormezano and Sari M. van Anders published the work on September 16, 2022 in Archives of Sexual Behavior, and a large part of the link ran through women feeling their partner depended on them like a child.

Everyone in the study was a woman living with a male partner and at least one child or dependent under 12. The first sample was recruited through Prolific in April 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic. The second was recruited in October and November 2021, with participants in the UK and South Africa. After exclusions, the final analyses covered 677 and 396 women.

The team did not rely on the usual short checklist of chores. It built a survey of 119 tasks, from finances and cleaning to social planning and household administration, and sorted them into eight categories. The authors wrote that older measures missed things like who organizes birthdays and holidays, who buys the presents, who listens to the kids’ worries and who sets up their medical care.

Participants rated each task from 1, “My partner always does this,” to 5, “I always do this.”

The partner who feels like an extra child

The result was the same in both samples: a bigger share of the labor meant lower desire for a partner, at β = −0.33 each time. It showed up across all eight categories. In the first sample, childcare and development had the strongest negative link (r = −0.35), followed by parenting logistics (r = −0.28) and life and social planning (r = −0.26).

The researchers tested two explanations. One was perceived partner dependence, measured with survey statements such as “Sometimes I feel as though my partner is like an extra child I need to look after.” That was a questionnaire item, not a participant’s quote. It helped explain the pattern in both samples, and in the first the authors estimated it accounted for 43% of the effect.

The other was perceived unfairness, measured with items like “Too many of the daily tasks in our household are my responsibility.” It explained the link in the second sample’s single-mediator model but not the first’s. When both were tested together, the unfairness pathway was not significant in either sample.

In the second sample, women estimated they spent an average of 37.85 hours a week on household labor, while their partners spent 18.17.

The study measured desire for a partner, not sexual satisfaction, which the authors noted is related but different. They described the findings as quantitative support for a socio-structural explanation of lower desire, rather than treating it only as a problem in women’s bodies or minds. The work drew on the heteronormativity theory of low desire in women partnered with men.

The authors also set limits. The study was cross-sectional, so it could not show cause and effect or which direction the relationship runs. The samples were mostly from Western countries, and the first was mostly White, so the findings may not hold across cultures or social identities.

A newer study muddied the picture

An independent paper, “Division of Household Labor and Sexual Desire: The Role of Gender and Benevolent Sexism,” came out on April 27, 2026. Alexandra Liepmann, Emily J. Cross and Amy Muise ran two preregistered studies with 943 people and found no general link between doing more household labor and lower desire.

For women, it depended on their views about gender roles. The lower-desire link was strongest among women who endorsed benevolent sexism less, and in the second study it did not appear for women who endorsed it more.

On October 12, 2026, the University of Colorado Boulder profiled the newer work. Liepmann said, “We found that when women endorsed less of these views, so what we think of as more egalitarian gender roles and were doing more of the household work than their partner, they were reporting the lowest level of sexual desire.”

“But when they were splitting the chores equally, they were actually reporting the highest level of sexual desire,” she said.

Her team is now looking at how couples talk about chores. Liepmann said, “Right now, my collaborators and I are working on assessing how couples are having conversations about division of chores and aiming to do an intervention study to see if intentionally assigning each member of the couple chores can make it more equitable.”