A woman whose children have left home can expect to spend 10.5 hours a week on household and child care. However, when those children don’t leave home, she spends 18 hours a week, on average, on those activities. A man, on the other hand, spends 5.5 hours on home and child care, whether he has adult kids in the house or not. In other words, women with adult children living at home spend, on average, eight more hours a week on house and child care, whereas men are unaffected.

Take laundry, one of the specific sources of time-use differences between men and women with children living at home. Women living with small or young adult children do almost three hours of laundry a week, while women without kids do closer to an hour and a half of laundry a week. Men, on the other hand, do about 30 minutes of laundry a week, regardless of whether they have kids — of any age — at home.