React: How Do You Feel About Doing Chores? Pretty Good, Actually

An initiative recently launched by the Everyday Sexism Project, the #ChoreChallenge, got us thinking.

Do people talk about doing chores on Twitter? Do they like them? Is there a gender divide? Thankfully the multitude of social data at our fingertips allows us to answer these questions.  

Dating back two months, over 563k people mentioned cleaning in some form on Twitter.

This number excludes retweets so that’s around 563k individuals, roughly the population of Luxembourg.

The excitement of a Saturday, finished cleaning the oven now off to buy a new ironing board. May have to sit down later to recover.

— Cllr Malcolm Cunning (@Malcolm4Linn) December 12, 2015

---

Who, what, when, where?

It was important for us not only analyze the gender divide for these chores, but also how people felt about the often boring tasks.

The overall division of labor between the sexes, if we’re looking at who’s tweeting about their chores, was 61% female and 39% male.

Surely this differs for different tasks we hear you ask? You are correct.

We took the most mentioned household tasks and broke them down to determine what poor soul was being left with the brunt of the ironing, or who risked electrocution by fixing a dodgy socket.

In fact, quite interestingly, the category with the highest proportion of male contributors is ironing.  

Complaining and giving-out about this, that, or the other feels very much at home on Twitter.

We have all intently followed a Twitter spat with morbid fascination, so we thought the conversation surrounding cleaning would be no different – quite the opposite in fact.

Again, we looked at each of the six categories only to discover that the majority of people were commending their cleanliness rather than bemoaning the burden.

Surely that good mood can’t be solely based on the satisfaction of having a clean toilet? Turns out it’s all about circumstance.

We found 4,228 mentions of people listening to music while they iron the night away.

Takes me hours to clean my rooms because I play my music loud as hell so if my jam comes on I stop cleaning to dance ??

— Alęxa Stanlęy (@Alexaaaa_Nicole) February 17, 2016

In addition, a lot of the conversation centers around the treats people intend to reward themselves with once the task has been completed. There were over 1,000 tweets mentioning wine!

Cleaning as a child wouldn’t have been so bad if I had the same bottle of wine I have now helping me out.

— Clare Maggie (@kywildcats569) February 17, 2016

Having said that, we did find 6000+ tweets with cuss words in them.

---

Generation gap

Chores are an essential part of life, no matter how old you are.

From a young age we are coaxed with pocket money and treats but as we get older it becomes a necessity – bar those dubious student years.

We wanted to understand how housework differs across generations so, using Audiences, we took samples of groups from three synonymous generations – Millennials, Gen Xers and Baby Boomers – to see if and when they tweeted about chores.

Millennials tweet the most often about doing chores or housework, although there’s a noticeable slump in the middle of the week.

Both baby-boomers and millennials are clearly not keen on chores on a Friday, while Generation X individuals keep up on their housework chatter consistently throughout the week.

Interestingly, Sunday, considered a day of rest by many, appears to be a prime time for chore-based productivity for all three generations, if their tweets are anything to go by.

---

Do you like to tell the world about your chore achievements?