In spite of the social advances of recent decades towards greater gender equity, there are still very conservative views regarding the roles to be played by men and women, especially in the domestic sphere. Although much has been achieved with regard to female presence in previously predominantly male work environments, little or nothing has changed in relation to housework and caring for the children, the elderly and the disabled, which remain socially understood as female responsibilities.
The set of domestic activities, such as cleaning, cooking and caring for people, essential to the proper functioning of societies, is not rewarded with income generation corresponding to its importance, as well as being ignored by economic theory and country GDP accounting. The origins of this unequal logic probably go back to historical discrimination against women, which in capitalism consisted in the separation of productive and reproductive work (the former being remunerated and imputed to men, and the latter, unpaid and imposed on women).
If it were accounted for, domestic labor would account for some 11.2% of Brazil's Gross Domestic Product, which would amount to an increase of R $ 260.2 billion to GDP, of which 82% would correspond to values created by women . Recognizing and making public the importance of female domestic work for the production of welfare for families and for the country as a whole could help to reduce discrimination against women. (Pereira de Melo et al., 2007).
The main objective of this study is to investigate the origins and current situation of the division of responsibilities between men and women in domestic tasks and their impact on the female situation in the Brazilian labor market through the analysis of the variable "time dedicated to domestic work" with the purpose of quantifying one of the main causes of imbalances observed in the Brazilian labor market: the unpaid exploitation of female domestic labor.
The microdata analyzed in this study, extracted from the PNAD 2015 and the supplement "Aspects of the Care of Children Under 4 Years of Age", were treated and analyzed through SPSS statistical software.
Supplement data had some advantages as the possibility of providing a greater homogeneity of the profile surveyed, since the variable "first responsible for children up to 4 years old" avoids comparisons between family arrangements that are different from each other in terms of domestic workload (with children versus no children), besides the limit of the age of the children (up to four years) which is also another factor of control, since children in this age group usually demand a higher level of care.
Preliminary results suggest that the unequal distribution of domestic work between men and women begins very early, even during childhood, and increases until it reaches a peak in the adult and reproductive stage of the woman. In the 5 to 9 age group, Brazilian girls already spend 16.3% more time with domestic tasks than boys of the same age. The height of the differential is from the age of 26 to 50, when women spend an average of 135% more time with domestic work than men. From the age of 50, the difference starts to decrease due to an increase in male participation (in hours) in household tasks. The female participation (in hours) only begins to decline from the 70 years of age.
Regarding the variable "first responsible for children up to 4 years old", the results suggest an overestimation of the percentage of male individuals identified as first responsible, possibly due to a dubious understanding of the meaning of the term "first responsible" and / or to the overestimation of the male contribution in the division of housework.
Female participation in household chores is significantly higher than men's: 23.1 hours in the general average, and 29 hours when identified as first responsibles of children up to four years old. In general, men spend less than half the time spent by women with housework (10.5 hours) and increase the average weekly domestic work time by only 2.4 hours when are identified as being first responsible for young children, while the average domestic work time performed by women increases by approximately 6 hours per week when they are identified as first responsible for young children.
Another aspect that reinforces the hypothesis of overestimation of the percentage of male first responsible is the large presence of women (as spouses or mothers) in households where men are identified as the first responsibles, in contrast to expressively lower percentages of women in similar situations. According to the data, 94.8% of males and females lived in the company of the spouse, while, among women, this percentage is 74.1%. Among the males who did not have a spouse (5.2%), 71.4% lived with their mother, resulting in only 34 males who did not live with either a spouse or their mother. Among women, this percentage is considerably lower (58.0%), resulting in 1,465 women responsible for young children, who do not have a spouse, nor do live with their mothers.
The data also suggest a transference of domestic tasks to the wife in heterosexual relationships, as well as the interchangeability between the mother and the wife in the execution of these tasks when we compare the time spent with such activities in relation to the sex and the presence of spouse and / or of the mother at home. That is, there is evidence of a dynamic of transferring domestic responsibilities to women whether through marital relationships or through family ties between mothers and children. The increase in the time spent with domestic activities, which the presence of the spouse entails in the life of the women, makes marital relations a real burden as regards the time spent on unpaid tasks, while for men, the presence of the woman in the household becomes an instrument of transference, for the wife or the mother, of this type of task.
When they have a spouse, women who are responsible for small children spend an average of 6.4 hours more on household chores than women who do not have a spouse, while male participation goes in the opposite direction, declining 1.2 hours when there is presence of spouse at home. When there is no spouse, but the mother is present, the men spend almost the same time with housework (12 hours) compared to the presence of a spouse, but the mother is absent (12.4 hours). When both spouses and mothers are present at home, the average time falls by 9.4% (in relation to 12.4 hours), totaling 11.3 hours of domestic work - the lowest among the four arrangements examined. Among women, the dynamics, once again, are different: the presence of the spouse always entails more hours of domestic work, and the arrangement that corresponds to the least amount of hours spent with domestic work is that which occurs in the absence of a spouse and with the presence of the mother, suggesting a dynamic of division of labor between women (mothers and daughters) that does not seem to occur between men and women (between spouses or between mothers and children).
The work is still ongoing. The next steps are the deepening of the theoretical part of the work and the exploration of additional variables, such as income and race. In addition, regression models (in principle, multiple linear regression models) will be tested, with the variable hours of domestic labor as the dependent variable and the variables preliminarily studied as explanatory variables (gender, spouse, mother, responsible, etc.), added with other control variables such as income, age and race, with the objective of investigating the magnitude of such variables in the amount of domestic work hours performed weekly by the individuals in the households. 
The work is still ongoing. The next steps are the deepening of the theoretical part of the work and the exploration of additional variables, such as income and race. In addition, regression models (in principle, multiple linear regression models) will be tested, with the variable hours of domestic labor as the dependent variable and the variables preliminarily studied as explanatory variables (gender, spouse, mother, first responsible, etc.), added with other control variables such as income, age and race, with the objective of investigating the magnitude of such variables in the amount of domestic work hours performed weekly by the individuals in the households.

PEREIRA DE MELO, Hildete; CONSIDERA, Claudio Monteiro; SABBATO, Alberto Di. Os afazeres domésticos contam. p. 435–454 , 2007.