Men Get Lazy on Vacation While Women End up Doing More Work: Poll

As summer comes to an end and families return home from vacation, a new poll reveals that not everyone is relaxing during their time off. 

Women in heterosexual couples finish their vacations more fatigued and more stressed than their male counterparts, according to a poll from the IFOP Institute. 

The poll, which was conducted for the French travel website Bons Plans Voyage New York, indicates that women are doing more work on vacation than their male partners – and the men are aware of this. 

At the end of their vacations, 70% of the women polled reported feeling fatigued, compared to 57% of men. Similarly, 53% of women said they were stressed following their vacations, while just 39% of men said they felt the same way. 

This disparity seems to be largely rooted in the division of labor between men and women while traveling. Only 11% of men reported doing the laundry during their vacations and just 10% reported that they took care of the cleaning. 

The majority of men who responded to the poll recognized that women are doing more work – with 56% saying that they rested more than their partners on vacation. 

François Kraus, the director of the gender and sexualities unit at IFOP was critical of the ways in which vacations lead to couples reverting to traditional gender roles. 

“This backward-looking devolution of the organization of vacations to women is based on an undeniably conservative vision of their free time,” Kraus said, in a statement. 

“If a woman's professional activity legitimizes a more egalitarian distribution of domestic work, moments of inactivity such as holidays encourage a return to her 'natural' role: caring above all for her children and his home.”