What do husbands bring to a marriage? More housework for wives!

The results of a new study which has found that marriage creates hours more housework for women will come as no surprise to the majority of married women.

Indeed many women will wonder why this needs researching.

Anyway it is now scientifically confirmed that wives can thank their husbands for hours of additional housework.

The new study has found that husbands are responsible for the extra hours that needs to be spent on chores and the researchers suggest that this is because men do more work outside of the home.

The researchers from the University of Michigan say a significant reallocation of labour happens with marriage which is a well-known pattern and men tend to work more outside the home, while women take on more of the household labour.

Frank Stafford from the university's Institute for Social Research (ISR), who led the research says each week, a wife saves her husband an hour of chores and the situation gets worse for women when they have children.

For the study the researchers looked data from a 2005 time-diary study on income dynamics that has been on-going since 1968 at ISR; the diaries helped to determine how men and women spent their time while at home.

The researchers also questioned men and women about how much time they spend cooking, cleaning and doing basic work around the house.

Their results showed that married women did around 20 hours of housework a week, while single women did about 12 hours per week; women with three or more children did more than 28 hours of housework a week involving cleaning, cooking and washing.

But women need not despair, according to the researchers this indicates an improvement as a in 1976 women did an average of 26 hours of housework a week, while men did about six!