Couples who share the housework are more likely to divorce, study finds

Our take: A new study from Norway has found that the divorce rate between couples that share housework equally is significantly higher than between couples where the wife does the majority of housework. Now, before husbands step away from the dishwasher, the study found that chores seemed to be a symptom of couples' marital values rather than a cause-and-effect relationship. The U.K.'s Telegraph discusses the implications of the study's findings.

In what appears to be a slap in the face for gender equality, the report found the divorce rate among couples who shared housework equally was around 50 per cent higher than among those where the woman did most of the work.

What weve seen is that sharing equal responsibility for work in the home doesnt necessarily contribute to contentment, said Thomas Hansen, co-author of the study entitled Equality in the Home.

The lack of correlation between equality at home and quality of life was surprising, the researcher said.

One would think that break-ups would occur more often in families with less equality at home, but our statistics show the opposite, he said.

The figures clearly show that the more a man does in the home, the higher the divorce rate, he went on.

The reasons, Mr Hansen said, lay only partially with the chores themselves.

Read more about the study on The Telegraph.