Dads Are Working Six Fewer Hours a Week. Statistically, Half of That Time Goes to Laundry.

Earlier this month, the American Institute for Boys and Men published a paper by researcher Ariel Binder on what dads have been doing since the pandemic. Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal both covered it. The findings are clean enough that I am going to put them in bullets, which I rarely do.

• Among couples, the gender gap in weekly paid work hours has fallen 4.3 hours since 2019. About three-quarters of that closing came from husbands cutting hours, not wives working more.
• College-educated dads cut paid work by six hours a week and added more than four hours of housework and childcare.
• For couples with a child under six, the housework and childcare gap dropped from 18.6 hours to 14.8; a 20% narrowing in five years.
• The pace of convergence is now faster than it was during Claudia Goldin's "quiet revolution" of 1969 to 1992. (The Nobel-prize winning one.)

The first time in twenty-five years the gap is closing again. And this time it is the dads doing it.

The line that matters for us

Of the new hours that college educated dads put in at home, the researchers were specific. About half went to direct childcare. The other half went to other household tasks.

That is the laundry. That is the dishwasher. That is the mystery stain on the towel that was, until very recently, somebody else's problem.

What this actually looks like

It is not a guy in an apron. It is a guy with a laptop closed at 3pm and a hamper open at 3:01. It is a guy who has discovered, in real time, what a "delicates" cycle is. It is a guy who now has opinions about the dishwasher.

It is also a guy who is about to learn that the detergent under the sink, the one that has been there since 2014 does not actually remove the stain from the white tee his daughter wore to a barbecue.

The researchers also pointed out, dryly, that the shift cannot be fully explained by remote work or by men switching into different industries. Inside both college and non-college groups, almost none of the change is accounted for by either factor. It looks like dads just decided to be home more. The economists called the unexplained portion "the residual."

We are calling it a market.

This is, in fact, what the brand is for

This is why we started DadMode. The brand exists because there is a specific moment the one where you realize that the spaghetti sauce, the grass stain, the unidentifiable yellow on the collar is now your responsibility. No product currently on the shelf actually solves all of these problems.

It is an enzyme problem. There are seven categories of biological stains. Most laundry detergents address two or three of them. We made one that handles all seven, including nuclease, which breaks down the kind of DNA & RNA material (like bodily fluids).   

So if you are the person in the house who has been running the wash since 2011, and you have started to notice that the guy you live with is suddenly loading his own darks, he is in the data now. He is part of a trend.