We tried a chore calculator to find out who’s really pulling their weight in our

Even the most loved-up couples likely disagree over who should do the housework.

During the festive period, there are always questions of who will do what chores.

‘I’ll tidy up, if you take the bins out?’ Or ‘I cooked this morning, it’s your turn to wash up.’ 

But a calculator launched by Starling Bank aims to help partners finally settle the debate and help those in relationships plan household tasks equally.

The Share the Load tool asks couples to separately enter the amount of hours they spend on each chore before calculating how the load is currently shared. 

It comes after research by the British digital bank found that partners can’t agree who contributes most, with 72 per cent of women saying they do the majority of household tasks, but just 18 per cent of men agree. 

Ruthie Collins and her husband Lee, a director in the energy sector, both tried Starling Bank’s Share The Load website tool – first launched last month and were surprised by the results…

‘Okay, so it looks like we are pretty much equal.’ Looking at our results from Share The Load, it’s more or less as we’d thought – we both roughly do about 50/50.

But both of us believe that we do a fractional more or less amount of housework than the other. ‘What do you mean you make the bed?’ I ask, incredulous, forgetting that my husband Lee, a director in the energy sector, has made the bed (very nicely) twice in the last week.

I immediately feel bad for overlooking his invisible labour.

If we were more equal in our sharing of the load, the website tool chides us, our partners would be free to watch, say, an entire series of Lost throughout the year, or learn skateboarding skills!

The stakes are high here.

I have long forfeited my dominance of the remote control to my now Simpsons’ obsessed tween, so a little bit of extra telly might not go amiss. But I’m not convinced most parents would appreciate more equality in sharing their domestic loads, just so they can have more screen time.

22 hours of labour, nearly four years of breast-feeding and twelve years of constant juggling and flexible working so I could be the primary carer for our son, is hard to sum up in a weekly split in household chores. 

So, I go for what an average week looks like for both of us now – and so does Lee. While it’s true that we largely share the load equally these days, it’s not always the case.

Lee sorted going down to a four-day week for the first six months of us having our son so I could continue to have meetings and work. 

‘How did you swing that?’ another colleague who also had kids, asked him. ‘I just asked’, he shrugged. ‘Hmmm, thinking about it, I’d rather be at work, than home,’ they laughed.

Which says a lot.

In those early months, Lee helped with the night feeds, when the sleep deprivation was so much for me I needed a break. 

And our son was quite possibly the only toddler to ever make an appearance at Lee’s then workplace if I needed more time to make a work deadline.

But this does not change the slap that we felt when six months was up and he was corralled back to full time hours – eclipsed only by the sheer amount of money we had to spend on childcare.

Or the fact that even now, when I have deadlines, the house looks like a blizzard has hit.

A closer inspection of Lee’s results show that he believes he spends more time on family than I do. Which I am really surprised at! But we both agree this is largely because of the hours he puts into driving our son around.

Lee remembers, after his results, too late, that he’s overlooked how it takes me longer when it’s my turn to do the school run, because of the hours of waiting for buses, that often seem to mysteriously vanish. Just like I’ve also overlooked that he has, in fact, washed the windows. Twice in the last year.

There’s no section on the website tool for ‘delegated to children’, or ‘helped out by the grandparents’ but there is for managing the mental load of organising said help. It really shouldn’t, but this feels like a giant leap, even acknowledging that there is such a thing – we both agree this is something I do more of.

Share The Load gives a great snapshot of us now. But does not reflect the months of (painful and yes, perhaps pointless) after school SATS revision I waded through last year while our son was in Year 6 of Primary School. Not to mention home educating in the pandemic.

Lee has the work flexibility to share the school runs so much that another mum we know once called him ‘one of the girls.’

But parents of all genders struggle to have that freedom, in modern day working environments. 

Lee may accept that I’m not his unpaid nanny and cleaner, but there are times when he’s been under such severe pressure to work above his contracted hours, I’m not convinced all of his working colleagues over the years have felt the same way.

And yes, he irons (I’m really not very good at it), while I do the laundry most of the time, so we both agreed on the equal split on the website tool for that category. But am genuinely baffled that in the 21st century there are people who find Lee ironing, hilarious about us as a couple.

Most surprising, using the website tool sparked a massive debate about how much time I spend on the dishes. I couldn’t believe I spend so long doing this each week. Neither could Lee, apparently. ‘What constitutes washing up?’ he asks, ‘on the app – is it dishes in the sink, or just using the dish washer?’

‘I calculated both, because funnily enough I do actually do both, rather than just leave dishes in the sink until someone – ie, me, moves them,’ I niggle.

And the debate just goes on.

What’s clear, is that we both overlook each other’s labour and could share a little more equally. As Share The Load points out – only 29 per cent of couples share the load equally, which leads to more than five arguments every month on average.

It could be good if the website tool was designed with an option for co-parents, living separately. Sharing the load is still necessary for those who aren’t together as couples. And while it seems pitched at families, as a website tool, you could use it if you don’t have kids, too.

For every person who has ideas of what’s normal for modern day life, you’ll find someone with a totally different perspective – the point is, that we all find our own way that works for us. 

And if it’s not working, we need tools that help us speak our minds and gain the help we need. Share The Load feels like a tiny step in the right direction – but like any tool, it’s how well we use it that counts. Only time will tell for that.