elease time：2016-10-03  

They may complain about spending so much of the day stuck in the office, but married Hong Kong men also find time to do an average of 1.41 hours of housework a day, according to a series of surveys.

Married mainland men manage 1.1 hours and Taiwanese 0.73 of an hour. For married women, Hongkongers still lead with 2.7 hours of housework on average in a day, compared to 2.3 hours on the mainland and in Taiwan.

"Hong Kong men also take on more housework than men in other South Asian countries," the report on the Hong Kong Panel Study of Social Dynamics says.

"It shows that Hong Kong has better equality between men and women."

It is the first part of a five-year study, completed at the end of 2011 by the Centre for Applied Social and Economic Research of the University of Science and Technology. The mainland data comes from a 2010 Peking University survey, while Taiwan prestigious Academia Sinica made their findings in 2006.

Hong Kong men still lag behind married Scandinavian men when it comes to housework, said the director of the Hong Kong centre, Dr Wu Xiaogang. In countries such as Sweden and Denmark, where few families have domestic helpers, husbands put in about two hours a day, he said.

The Hong Kong study polled more than 6,000 adults.

It found that the more Hong Kong married women contributed to the family financially, the less housework they did. However, they return to more housework once they contribute 50 per cent or more to family finances.

This is because men are still seen as economic pillars while women are responsible for the home and family.

Professor Joe Leung Cho-bun, of social work department in the University of Hong Kong, said: "I believe this ideology will change. But it is hard to say if this ideology is good or bad."

(Source: South China Morning Post)