He doesn’t know where the toilet paper is. He doesn’t know who the pediatrician is. He has never planned a meal, started a load of laundry, or thought about what time school pickup is. And somehow, none of that is considered a problem. Weaponized incompetence, or the practice of being so helpless that the labor simply falls on someone else, has long been a feature of domestic life.
But Wharton economist Corinne Low has spent years researching the data proving what many women have quietly suspected: it isn’t a quirk, a personality flaw, or a bad habit particular to certain men. It is, at this point, a structural constant. And it’s getting worse as women enter the workforce in greater numbers than their male counterparts and outearn them in greater numbers.
“Men’s time doing housework is about the same as it was in the 1970s,” she told Fortune, “and that’s true whether or not the woman earns more money or the man earns more money.” That stagnation, she argued, is the central reason women feel like progress has stalled, because it has, at least on one side of the equation.
The assumption based off classical economic theory was that as women earned more, the domestic scales would naturally balance out. More income meant more leverage, the thinking went, and more ability to negotiate a fairer split of the cooking, the cleaning, the laundry, the kids, the pets, the hosting (the whole laundry list), the mental load of running a household. And despite this, Low said, that hasn’t changed even though external factors on labor have.
Even when a wife out-earns her husband, she still does almost twice as much cooking and cleaning as her lower-earning partner. Low used a real-world scenario from her research: a couple consisting of a nurse and an Uber driver, where the woman earns four times more per hour than the man, and yet, she still carries the heavier domestic load while he logs more hours at work. “The programming is there,” Low explained, describing how deeply ingrained gender expectations lead men to equate contribution with paid work hours, even when the math argues against it. “It would actually be more helpful if he stayed home, took the kids off from daycare so she could pick up a shift as a nurse, and the whole household would be richer.”
There’s also been a dramatic transformation in how Americans parent. Parenting time has exploded since the 1990s, and the burden has not been shared equally. “Working moms today are spending more time with their kids than stay-at-home moms when we were kids,” she said. Men have increased their parenting involvement somewhat, but Low said that doesn’t equate to the effort moms are putting in. When men cite dropping kids at daycare or trading off bedtime stories as evidence they’re doing their part, the data, Low said, te glls a different story. Because overall parenting time has risen so dramatically for everyone, “the gap with their wives has actually widened instead of narrowed. But when it comes to that more routine household drudgery, men’s time has not changed at all.”
For Low, that’s troubling because men (who do go to work) are opting for largely male-dominated roles that may not fit today’s workforce—and are keeping the same mentality at home. “I think it is an existential problem for men to learn to step into new roles and to actually pull their weight at home,” she said. “Because suddenly she’s her household’s breadwinner, but he’s claiming he’s useless in the kitchen, and he doesn’t know where the toilet paper is. He doesn’t know who the kid’s pediatrician is.”
The consequences of that weaponized incompetence, Low argued, are evident in marriage and birth rates. As women’s earning power grows, their tolerance for an unequal domestic arrangement is shrinking. “When I have my own paycheck, and now I’m seeing men who have been laid off or their jobs have been displaced, why am I going to accept that he’s not going to pull his weight around the house? That doesn’t work for me,” Low said.
What concerns her most is that the current moment is reshuffling economic roles without doing the deeper cultural work. “What I’d like to see is that we are actually reshaping gender roles more deeply, and not just reshaping earning power,” she said. “What’s shifting is earning power, but the deeper gender roles actually aren’t being reshaped.” Until that changes, women will keep doing what Low describes as playing the career game on the hardest possible difficulty setting, with no cheat codes and none of the behind-the-scenes support that makes it look easy for everyone else.
