The day after Hurricane Sandy, my husband had cabin fever and was desperate to go for a walk. We had been trapped in our apartment for 36 hours. Here was the rub. His father was about to come over, and our living room was strewn with shut-in detritus: magazines, beef jerky wrappers, and empty soup cans. Even though I was eight months pregnant, I insisted we tidy up. My husband argued that his dad didn’t care if our place was a bit messy, but it’s really hard to fight with a massively pregnant person who is hanging up jackets and washing dishes.

When it comes to housecleaning, my basically modern, egalitarian marriage starts looking more like the backdrop to an Updike short story. My husband and I both work. We split midnight baby feedings. My husband would tell you that he does his fair share of the housework, but if pressed, he will admit that he’s never cleaned the bathroom, that I do the dishes nine times out of ten, and that he barely knows how the washer and dryer work in the apartment we’ve lived in for over eight months. Sure, he changes the light bulbs and assembles the Ikea furniture, but he’s never scrubbed a toilet in the six years we’ve lived together.

This is not just our issue. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 55 percent of American mothers employed full time do some housework on an average day, while only 18 percent of employed fathers do. Even if you control for the fact that moms with full-time jobs tend to work fewer hours than dads with full time jobs (as studies have), working women with children are still doing a week and a half more of “second shift” work each year than their male partners.

Even in the famously gender-neutral Sweden, women do 45 minutes more housework a day than their male partners.

Furthermore, when you look at the granular data from time-use studies, the housework men actually do is both more gendered and less frequent than the housework women do. Fathers do slightly more lawn care than moms—11 percent of working dads are out mowing the lawn on an average day compared to 6.4 percent of working moms. So that means dads are out clipping the hedges on sunny Saturdays, while moms are the ones doing the drudgery of vacuuming day in and day out. And this isn’t solely an American phenomenon. Even in the famously gender-neutral Sweden, women do 45 minutes more housework a day than their male partners.

To be fair, men do far more cleaning now than they did in the Eisenhower era. But when you look at the advances women have made in getting men to share other domestics tasks—childcare, cooking—cleaning is still very much women’s work (though it’s worth noting that men still don’t do as much childcare and cooking as women do). The fact that it’s more than OK—cool even—for men to take on pretty much any domestic tasks but cleaning is everywhere in the wider culture. Louis C.K., one of the most popular stand-ups in the country, has constructed his entire identity around fatherhood and is still seen as masculine and hilarious. Ben Affleck is photographed carting his two daughters around a Los Angeles farmers market and the world swoons. There is a new magazine called Kindling Quarterly that looks like an Anthropologie catalog and bills itself as an “exploration of fatherhood.” Anthony Bourdain, Momofuku’s David Chang, and the Voltaggio brothers of "Top Chef" fame have made cooking synonymous with trash mouths and tattoos. Men with brawny arms host butchering classes in Middle America and Popular Mechanics has written a beginners guide to brewing beer.