The Last Straw/Frank McNally: A study carried out by the University of Ulster has painted a bleak picture of relations between the North's two main communities. No, I don't mean Protestants and Catholics, and their attempts to share power. I mean men and women, and their attempts to share housework.
Although the study refers only to Northern Ireland, the figures are in line with surveys elsewhere, specifically on the headline finding that despite increased involvement in the labour market, women spend an average 17 hours a week on housework, compared with six hours a week for men. But the origin of this latest survey does cast the issue in a particular light, and adds to the guilt that we in the moderate male community feel.
Some members of our persuasion have had difficulty adjusting to the loss of our once-dominant position in the days before the civil rights movement. We might even complain secretly that the female community exaggerates the oppression that went on under the old regime. But the important thing is that we are now committed to ending centuries of misunderstanding between our peoples, and engaging in meaningful dialogue about a way forward. In this spirit, I want to raise a couple of points about these housework surveys. This one, like others, seems to define the contrasting performances of men and women in terms of time spent on work. I just wonder - no offence to women - if speed might be an issue here.
Not to over-generalise, but it's a plain fact that the sexes do things differently. For example, we know that women drivers are much more careful than men (I'm using the word "careful" in a broad sense, which readers can interpret according to gender). And that, when it comes to pulling in or out of a parking space, they can sometimes be painfully careful. But the amount of care they take in other areas - dressing up to go out, for example, or talking to other women on the phone - often astonishes male observers.
All I'm saying is that time spent on housework may not be a reliable index. It's a common complaint of women that men turn everything - even household cleaning - into a competition which is surely a tacit admission that their own performances against the clock could be improved. Which brings me to a second point these surveys rarely address.
You're a man, trying to do your bit around the house. You've just swept the living-room floor. And all right, you may have missed one or two spots, but it's a pretty good performance, considering it only took you a minute and a half and you had to sweep around the kids who were eating pizza off the middle of it. But then, just as you're feeling virtuous, your wife surveys the job coolly and says: "You call that swept?"
The point is that while women do an estimated 70 per cent of housework, they set an estimated 100 per cent of the standards, at least in terms of hygiene. Women will trust men to perform the menial end of the work, under supervision, but not to decide what constitutes a job properly done. It's not our fault some of us are slobs. If we have to share the work, we want representation on the policing board too.
An area never mentioned in surveys is the time- and labour-saving at which men are so talented. Consider the issue of electrical appliances, which often come with detailed manuals, perhaps running to several hundred pages and written by people who must have been on drugs. Left to their own devices (literally as well as figuratively), women would read these manuals line by line, adding another 17 hours a week to their housework, and perhaps emerging none the wiser.
By contrast, no man - even if he's unwrapping a home-assembled nuclear-powered dishwasher - will ever consult the directions, preferring instead to fit pieces together instinctively, and then plug the machine in and see what happens.
This huge contribution to domestic time reserves is, of its nature, hidden. The nearest the University of Ulster study gets to acknowledge it is an admission that the one housework category where men do more than their share is "repairs". And OK, many of these repairs may relate to failure to read the manual. But, overall, I'd say we're well ahead on this one.
To sum up, despite the gloomy news from the University of Ulster, there are grounds for optimism. The prospects for the domestic peace process are at least as good as for the political one. And while I wouldn't bet on men doing their fair share before a final resolution in the North, I think we'll definitely get there before the Middle East is settled.