So already, American men do way less around the house than they should—unlike those glorious French men, who not only know how to make that sexy “r” sound, but also how to pick up a Swiffer every once and a while.

The study authors then sought to determine how an American married couple’s relative salaries would affect their willingness to do chores. As expected, when unemployed, both men and women did slightly more housework. And the more money the wives made, the more the husbands helped out around the house—all good there.

But things change when the wife earns more than the husband. In that case, he does less than he otherwise would. In female-breadwinner households, the greater the income disparity, the less housework the husband does.

From the study:

A wife who earns an extra thousand dollars a week can only expect her husband to do an extra 11 minutes a day of housework if she makes more than he does. If she makes less than he does, adding an extra thousand dollars a week means that he’s going to do an extra 27 minutes of housework a day.

You can see the out-earned husbands (red line) doing relatively less housework compared to the breadwinner husbands (blue line) in this chart:

Minutes Per Day Spent on Housework by Married Men

About Gender 2014

The Cassinos speculate that being out-earned by their wives threatens mens’ masculinity, so they react by doing less cleaning, a stereotypically feminine task. We can imagine these men thinking, “She might earn all the money, but I’m not going to do dishes,” Dan Cassino told me.

Past research by Rutgers psychologists Janell Fetterolf and Laurie Rudman has shown that as men and women make more money, they both feel entitled to do less housework and childcare. But it’s only for men that this entitlement translated to actually taking it easy around the house; women continue to pick up toys and do laundry even if they feel like they shouldn’t have to. And again, those who out-earned their husbands performed more domestic labor than those who earned the same or less than their spouses.

The only exception to this double-injustice? Cooking. In Cassino’s study, between 2002 and 2010, men upped the amount of time they spent cooking each day. And cooking didn’t follow the same gender-threatened trend cooking did: The more their wives earned, the more time the men spent in the kitchen.

As the authors explain:

Men who make less than their wives do a bit more cooking than they would otherwise, and the more money his wife makes, the more cooking a husband is expected to do. The more money his wife makes, the more time a husband spends cooking: about 1 extra minute for every $150 dollars his wife earns in a week.

Meanwhile, as men earn more, women spend less time cooking, at a rate of about 1 minute per $1,000 of weekly income.

Surprisingly, this cooking trend only emerged after 2008. Before the recession, cooking followed the same pattern as housework, with out-earned men doing relatively little of it. “Cooking is not seen as being as intertwined with masculinity as housework,” the Cassinos write. “Preparing food can easily involve the use of specialized equipment and techniques, a craft that men can be proud of their prowess in.”