Housework reporting reporting

Listening to the Slate Money podcast, I heard about an interesting survey result

Elizabeth Spiers:  My number is 73 and that’s percent and that’s the number of men in a recent YouGov survey who say they do most of the chores in their household.

I found a Washington Post story

60 percent of women who live with a partner say they do all or most of the chores. But 73 percent of similarly situated men say that they do the most — or that they share chores equally.

Here’s the top few lines of the YouGov table

Breaking out advanced statistical software, 23%+19% is 42%, and 33%+30% is 63%. The figure for women matches the story, allowing for reasonable rounding. The figure for men doesn’t?

If we add in “shared equally”, which is given as 33% for men and 22% for women we can get to 75% “all” or “most” or “equally” for men, but 83% “all” or “most” or “equally” for women.  And while the story is supposed to be that men say they are doing more and are delusional, the reported table has more work self-reported by women than men at all levels. It’s still possible, of course, that some the 42% of men claiming to do all or most chores are not fully aware of the situation, but the message that makes the results headline-worthy is not in the data.

The Washington Post story is still well worth reading — it uses the YouGov poll as a hook to discuss much more detailed data from the American Time Use Survey, which has the advantage that people write down contemporaneously what they are doing for an actual two weeks rather than trying to guess at an average.