Incredibly Helpful NY Times Poll Shows That Women Disagree With Men About Who Does More Of The Homeschooling

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Start your day with a healthy bowl of useful data. The New York Times asked a handful of people which partner shoulders the homeschooling load in their house. Men gave 45% of the credit to themselves, 39% to their spouse, 11% had no idea, and 5% were rich enough to hire a nanny. Meanwhile, 80% of the LADIES gave themselves credit, and only 3% to their spouse. Fascinating. What can we conclude from this data?

Women are twice as likely as men to give themselves credit.

Kidding. Come on, that’s a joke. Aww I’m kidding! Please don’t go. I apologize. Come back.

Look, we get it. The message is this: men should do more to pull their weight around the house, especially when it comes to cooking, home-schooling, and cleaning. That’s a good message, absolutely. I certainly suspect that women are doing much more of the household work these days, and that’s bullshit. My girlfriend unequivocally does more of the cooking than I do, mostly because the food she produces is so much better than what I make. Therefore, I do the dishes and help with meal prep—whatever she needs. It’s not 50/50, but I’m not eating ice cream on the couch, watching war docs like Tony Soprano.

But to illustrate this message, the NY Times asked men and women “who do you think does more work?” The answer options were Me, My Spouse, Someone Else, and Don’t Know. What fair options. Can’t imagine those answers will lead to any sort of skewed results.

Want to know how you know a poll is a complete joke? When 11% of the people responding check “don’t know” for who is educating the children.

Remember that old PSA that was beaten to death—it’s 10PM, do you know where your children are? Apparently, that question is more apt than ever. According to this poll, a hefty portion of our nation’s parents do not have a clue who is teaching their children. Gun to their head, they can’t say. Can’t even venture a guess. As though they received this poll in their email inboxes and that was the first reminder they’d had in months that their kids were no longer in school. Oh! The kids!! Shoot, uhm… gosh. Really putting me on the spot here. Didn’t expect riddles this early on a Thursday.

This “study” does not tell us how the household/homeschooling work in America is split between men and women. It tells us how men and women think the work is split. It tells us that we disagree pretty strongly. And with an 8% margin of error for the men and a 7% MOE for women, I have 99% confidence interval that this poll is completely worthless.

PS- in the one statistics class I took in college, I used to lie down between the rows of seats to sleep. Lecture attendance was mandatory. I was always there, just not always conscious. If the previous paragraph has statistical flaws in it, mea culpa.