Over 30% of men say they have never done this simple household chore

Think you’re the only one complaining about your man never changing the bedsheets? A new survey says it’s more common than you think.

A third of men admitted that they have never changed bed sheets before in an eye-opening study done with 1,000 men and women from the US, Australia, and the UK. Family-owned cleaning company Maid2Match crunched the data on household cleaning habits finding that 32% of men in the study have never changed bed sheets at home, with men from the US being the worst offenders of the three countries.

While changing the bed sheets is bad enough, how about men purposely sabotaging a chore in order to never do it again? More than half (53%) said they have performed a chore badly on purpose, according to the study, which leaves about two-thirds of women (66%) claiming that they do the majority of or all household chores.

“We were quite surprised at how traditional the majority of families and couples still are with how they designate cleaning responsibilities,” Toby Schulz, CEO, and co-founder of Maid2Match, said in a press statement. “We have a significant number of male cleaners working for us, but it appears that outside of the cleaning industry, the duty of chores still falls mainly on the woman’s shoulders.”

By country, American men (18%) were least likely to help with chores, followed by Australian men (26%), and more than a third of British men (39%).

Married men spend just over a half-hour each week completing chores, according to the study, while married women will spend two and a half hours on average every week.

And if purposely doing bad chores wasn’t enough for men, more than a quarter (26%) said they feel like they don’t receive enough praise or recognition for completing household tasks.

Even when considering the current coronavirus pandemic, the numbers don’t change. Eighty percent of women said they spent more time cleaning over the past three months, while just a fifth of men said they were the ones holding up the household (leave the kids out of it, you guys).

“Considering how much society has evolved over the last seventy years, where just as many women work full-time as do men, it seems unfair that they are still the ones who are picking up the dirty socks or vacuuming the house at the weekend,” Schulz said. “Obviously many households outsource cleaning now, and based on what some of our customers are telling us, for them it comes down to not wanting to regularly argue about who does what chores! But maybe our cleaning certificate will act as a fun tongue in cheek way for women to address the imbalance they are evidently still experiencing at home.”