Equal Couples App

Team: Dr. Jaclyn Wong, Dr Jason Radford

Despite women’s increasing participation in the paid labor force and the growing outsourcing of household chores, American women consistently do more housework than men. This inequality restricts women’s ability to work for pay and lowers their earnings, compromises women’s sleep and leisure time, and lowers women’s perceptions of relationship quality. While many scholars study inequality, none that we know of have sought to fix it. In this project, we look to identify interventions that increase equality within couples by increasing couples’ belief that they can share the work equally and improve the actual balance of housework. Working with newly cohabiting couples, we develop prototypes for interventions and field them with couples to see how well they work.