In the US, the average woman spends so much more time on chores than the average man that to equalise the load, women would have to quit the housework entirely now for the remainder of the year.

And that represents progress: the gender gap in chores narrowed a bit from last year, when women would have had to quit on August 29, a day I dubbed “Equal Housework Day”.

Since 2012, men have added about 12 minutes a day of household labour, extending a gradual long-term rise. To my surprise, women haven’t dialled back, but have added about 5 minutes each day. If men are doing more, why aren’t women doing less?

That question isn’t easily answered, in part because the amount of time people spend on housework varies widely according to whether they are rich or poor, working or retired, parents or childless. But in every demographic group, women do more housework than men.

Even single women living alone do more housework than single men, notes Liana Sayer, professor of sociology at the University of Maryland. The disparity is amplified in opposite-sex couples. And when women do less, it’s generally not because men have taken on more. It’s because of another woman, such as a hired house cleaner.

First, just to get this out of the way: Whenever I write about this, men email me to explain that the data must omit the stuff they do: paying bills, mowing the lawn, house repairs, and so on. But this objection doesn’t hold water. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics data takes such “typically male” tasks into account. Plus, I’ve excluded the enormous amount of time women spend on unpaid caregiving for children and other family members.

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What we’re left with is an apples-to-apples comparison of all the daily stuff of life: cooking, cleaning, laundry, car maintenance, gutter-clearing and the rest of it. Even if men do more of certain tasks, women do much more overall. And the justifications often trotted out – men don’t notice the mess, women are better at multitasking – have been proven wrong again and again.

But there is one common explanation that seems to be right: Women, on average, feel impelled to maintain higher standards of cleanliness. We’ve been taught that being a good wife and mother – a good woman – requires us to be clean. To do household tasks the “right” way. Perhaps that’s one reason why, even as US men have slowly stepped up their game, women have not stepped back.