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Even as more women slip into suits and head to the office every morning, they face the same piles of unfinished laundry, hungry mouths to feed and stacks of bills when they arrive home at night.

Why are women’s domestic workloads often more than men’s even as women succeed in historically male-dominated fields? CU professor Bernadette Park of psychology and neuroscience and her team have found that while men and women may see their work and home lives as equally shared, their expectations often are rooted in traditional gender roles.

One study surveyed 631 people at CU, of which 254 completed a subjective questionnaire that identified individual “traits” of two hypothetical people. They were a man and woman described as biomedical researchers with advanced degrees, married with two children and each working between 20 and 60 hours weekly.

Participants rated each spouse’s traits regarding warmth, ability to nurture, good-naturedness or sincerity. Participants also rated each on competence-related traits including being capable, skillful and efficient. Regardless of gender, hypothetical people who worked four 10-hour days a week and cared for children three days a week were seen as most competent while those who worked more were seen as less “warm.”

However, the participants’ perceptions of the “warmth” of men and women differed dramatically from what they expected each gender to do, researchers found. In the case of a hypothetical wife who worked 60 hours a week, survey participants thought she should still perform an average amount of child care, while a husband working the same amount was expected to do far less.