Several years ago, while observing a parenting group in Minnesota, I was struck by a confession one of the women made to her peers: She didn't really care that her husband did the dishes after dinner. Sure, it was swell of him, and she had friends whose husbands did less. But what she really wanted, at that point in her day, was for her husband to volunteer to put the kids to bed. She would have been glad to sit in the kitchen on her own for a few minutes with the water running and her mind wandering. Another woman chimed in: 'Totally. The dishes don't talk back to you.'
几年前，我在明尼苏达州观摩过一个育儿组织的讨论会，一位女士对其他成员坦陈心迹对我触动颇深。她说，她丈夫晚饭后刷盘子，但她一点也不觉得高兴。当然，他能刷盘子很了不起，她有一些朋友的丈夫家务做得更少。但晚饭之后她真正希望丈夫去做的事情是主动哄孩子睡觉。如果能一个人在厨房里坐几分钟，在水流声中发发呆，她会感到很高兴。另一位女士接过话头：“完全正确。盘子不会跟你顶嘴。”
According to the American Time Use Survey-which asks thousands of Americans annually to chronicle how they spend their days-men and women now work roughly the same number of hours a week (though men work more paid hours, and women more unpaid). Given this balanced ledger, one might guess that all would finally be quiet on the domestic front-that women would finally have stopped wondering how they, rather than their husbands, got suckered into such a heavy load. But they haven't. The question is: Why?
《美国人时间使用调查》(American Time Use Survey)（这项一年一度的调查让数千名美国人按时间顺序记录他们如何度过一天的时间）显示，如今男性和女性一周的工作时间基本相同（不过男性的有酬工作时间较长，女性的无酬工作时间较长）。既然这本时间账是平衡的，我们也许会猜测，夫妻双方在家务方面的所有矛盾最终都会平息――女性应该终于不再疑惑为什么是她们而不是丈夫被如此沉重的负担所纠缠。但她们的疑问并没有消除。这是为什么呢？
Part of the problem is that averages treat all data as if they're the same and therefore combinable, which often results in a kind of absurdity. On average, human beings have half an Adam's apple, but no one thinks to lump men and women together this way. Similarly, we should not assume that men and women's working hours are the same in kind. The fact is, men and women experience their time very differently.
问题的部分原因在于，我们求平均数时会把所有数据都视为同质的，因此认为它们可以合并，这通常会带来一种荒唐的结果。比如说，平均而言，每个人有半个喉结，但实际上没有人会这样把男女合并计算。同样，我们也不能以为男性和女性工作时间的性质相同。事实是，男性和女性对时间的感知大相径庭。
For starters, not all work is created equal. An hour spent on one kind of task is not necessarily the equivalent of an hour spent on another. Take child care, a task to which mothers devote far more hours than dads. It creates much more stress in women than other forms of housework. In 'Alone Together' (2007), a comprehensive look at the state of American marriage, the authors found that if women believe child care is unevenly divided in their homes, this imbalance is much more likely to affect their marital happiness than a perceived imbalance in, say, vacuuming.
首先，并非所有工作都“生而平等”。花在一种任务上的一小时不一定能与花在另一种任务上的一小时划等号。就拿照顾孩子来说，母亲在这项任务中花费的时间要比父亲多得多。照顾孩子为女性带来的压力要比其他家务劳动大得多。2007年出版的《在一起独处》(Alone Together)一书作者发现，如果女性觉得在照料孩子这件事上两人职责分摊不均，这种不平衡会比她们在吸尘等其他家务上感受到的不平衡更易影响婚姻幸福。《在一起独处》这本书对美国人的婚姻状态进行了全面审视。
Or consider night duty. Sustained sleep deprivation, as we know, consigns people to their own special league of misery. But it's generally mothers, rather than fathers, who are halfway down the loonytown freeway to hysterical exhaustion, at least in the early years of parenting. According to the American Time Use Survey, women in dual-earner couples are three times more likely to report interrupted sleep if they have a child under the age of 1, and stay-at-home mothers are six times as likely to get up with their children as are stay-at-home fathers.
再来看看夜间照料。我们知道，持续的睡眠剥夺会让人沦入一种特殊的悲惨境地，在通向歇斯底里和筋疲力尽的疯狂高速公路上行程已经过半。但驾车的几乎总是母亲，而不是父亲，至少在有孩子的头几年是这样。《美国人时间使用调查》显示，在有一岁以下孩子的双职工家庭里，女性睡眠被打断的几率是男性的三倍；而全职妈妈起床照看孩子的几率是全职爸爸的六倍。
Funny: I once sat on a panel with Adam Mansbach, the author of the best-selling parody 'Go the F- to Sleep.' At one point in the discussion, he conceded that his partner put his child to bed most nights. He may have written a book about the tyranny of toddlers at bedtime, but in his house, it was mainly Mom's problem.
有件很有意思的事情：我曾与畅销戏仿作品《快给我睡觉》(Go the F- to Sleep)一书作者亚当・曼斯巴赫(Adam Mansbach)一同参加讨论会。他在讨论中承认，大多数晚上都是他的伴侣哄孩子睡觉。他是写了本讲述幼童睡前暴行的书，但在他家里，这个难题主要扔给了孩子的妈妈。
Complicating matters, mothers assume a disproportionate number of time-sensitive domestic tasks, whether it's getting their toddlers dressed for school or their 12-year-olds off to swim practice. Their daily routine is speckled with what sociologists Annette Lareau and Elliot Weininger call 'pressure points,' or nonnegotiable demands that make their lives, as the authors put it, 'more frenetic.'
让情况更加复杂的是，母亲承担了过多的时间敏感型家务，不论是给幼童穿衣上学还是带12岁的孩子去练游泳。她们每天的日程安排中布满了社会学家安妮特・拉罗(Annette Lareau)和艾略特・魏因宁格(Elliot Weininger)所说的“压力点”，或者按照两位作者的话说就是，让她们生活变得“更抓狂”、毫无商量余地的要求。
These deadlines have unintended consequences. They force women to search for wormholes in the time-space continuum simply to accomplish all the things that they need to do. In 2011, the sociologists Shira Offer and Barbara Schneider found that mothers spend, on average, 10 extra hours a week multitasking than do fathers 'and that these additional hours are mainly related to time spent on housework and child care.'
这些最后期限会造成一些意外后果。它们迫使女性为完成她们需要做的所有事情而在连续的时空中寻找虫洞。2011年，社会学家希拉・奥费尔(Shira Offer)和芭芭拉・施奈德(Barbara Schneider)发现，母亲一周比父亲平均多花10小时来处理多重任务，“这些额外的时间主要花在家务和育儿方面”。
When fathers spend time at home, on the other hand, it reduces their odds of multitasking by over 30%. Which may explain why, a few years ago, researchers from UCLA found that a father in a room by himself was the 'person-space configuration observed most frequently' in their close study of 32 families at home. It may also explain why many fathers manage to finish the Sunday paper while their wives do not-they're not constantly getting up to refill bowls of Cheerios.
而对父亲们来说，呆在家里会将他们处理多重任务的可能性减少逾30%。这也许可以解释，为什么几年前加州大学洛杉矶分校(UCLA)的研究人员在针对32个家庭展开的细致入户研究中发现，父亲独自呆在房间里是“最常见的个人―空间格局”。这也许还可以解释为什么许多父亲都能看完星期天的报纸，而他们的妻子则无法看完――因为父亲不需要不断起身往碗里加麦圈。
Being compelled to divide and subdivide your time doesn't just compromise your productivity and lead to garden-variety discombobulation. It also creates a feeling of urgency-a sense that no matter how tranquil the moment, no matter how unpressured the circumstances, there's always a pot somewhere that's about to boil over.
被迫把你的时间一分再分不仅会影响工作效率，而且常常会让人头晕脑胀。它还会带来一种紧迫感――也就是不管当下有多平静，也不管环境有多轻松，你也总觉得某个地方有一罐即将沸腾的水。
'My husband says I cause some of the worry unnecessarily,' another Minnesota mother, who was part of the same parenting program, told me when I spent some time in her home.
参加上述育儿活动的另一位妈妈在我到她家拜访时对我说：“我丈夫说，是我造成了一些不必要的担忧。”
It's something that I hear a lot from parents. One of them-usually the mother-is more alive to the emotional undercurrents of the household. As a result, this more intuitive parent feels that the other parent-usually the father-is not doing his fair share, while the father feels that his wife is excessively emotional and wretchedly inefficient. But what really may be going on is that the couple is experiencing time differently, because each person is paying attention to different things.
我经常听父母们说这句话。父母中的一方（通常是母亲）对家庭的情绪潜流更敏感。于是，直觉更敏锐的这一方会感觉另一方（通常是父亲）没有尽到应尽的义务，而父亲则感觉自己的妻子太过情绪化而且做事效率低得可怜。但真相也许是夫妇双方对时间的感知不同，因为他们在关注不同的东西。
It's important to remember that fairness isn't just about absolute equality. It's about the perception of equality. Women may work fewer paid hours than men, but because they devote nearly twice as much time to family care (housework, child care, shopping), it doesn't look to women like their husbands are sharing the load evenly when they're all home together. It looks instead like their husbands are watching 'SportsCenter.'
我们必须牢记，公平不仅仅是绝对的平等，而是对平等的感知。女性的有酬工作时间可能比男性短，但她们用于照顾家庭（家务、照顾孩子、购物）的时间几乎相当于男性的两倍，因此在女性看来，当双方都在家时，她们的丈夫并没有均等地分担家务。她们感觉丈夫总是在看体育新闻。
It's hard to overstate how stressful these perceived imbalances can be. At one point, the UCLA researchers took saliva samples from most of the subjects of their study to measure levels of cortisol, the stress hormone. They found that while leisure time went a long way toward relaxing fathers, it did far less to subdue anxiety in mothers. So what, you may ask, did calm the mothers?
这些感受到的不平衡带来的压力之大怎么形容都不过分。加州大学洛杉矶分校的的研究人员在研究中提取了多数对象的唾液样本，以测量压力荷尔蒙皮质醇的水平。他们发现，尽管闲暇时间能很好地帮助父亲放松，但对减轻母亲焦虑情绪的效果却要差得多。那么你也许会问，什么才能让妈妈们恢复平静呢？
Simple: Seeing their husbands make a bigger effort to reduce the pandemonium in the house.
答案很简单：看到丈夫能更加努力地减轻家里的乱局。