And kids learn what’s expected of them not just by doing, but by observing: A study published last year found that men who grew up with working mothers tended to spend more time on child care, while women who grew up with working mothers were more likely to not only work but also work longer hours and make more money than those whose mothers didn’t work. “These beneficial outcomes are due at least in part to employed mothers’ conveyance of egalitarian gender attitudes and life skills for managing employment and domestic responsibilities simultaneously,” the researchers wrote.

Parents send other unequal messages to their children about the work they do around the house. According to data covering about 10,000 families released last year by BusyKid, an app for paying children allowance, the average boy earned $13.80 a week, while the average girl received $6.71—a pay gap at least as wide as the one between adult men and women in the workplace. It’s worth noting that this gap—like the aforementioned disparities in time use—forms well before kids grow up and enter the workforce.

The data from BusyKid also indicated that parents were more likely to pay boys than girls for personal-upkeep activities such as brushing their teeth or taking a shower. These are things that girls, in their teenage years, also spend more time on: According to the Pew analysis, teenage girls typically spent just over an hour on showering, getting dressed, and other hygiene- or appearance-related tasks, while teenage boys averaged 23 minutes fewer. (The gap for adult men and women for such personal-care activities is 28 minutes.)

In an attempt to give their little girls and boys equal opportunities, many parents seek to correct for society-level gender inequities by doing things like buying books about, say, astronauts or dinosaurs—topics typically coded as male—for their daughters. These efforts no doubt expand kids’ ideas of what’s possible, but it’s also important to consider what parents are themselves doing at home. In order to encourage a more equal distribution of housework, Yavorsky says, “they ultimately need to divide it more evenly amongst themselves, to model that to their kids.” Because it seems that those kids, once they grow up, will to some extent think about housework the way their parents did.

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