An annual survey by Gallup and Cookpad found that the “cooking gender gap” has widened in 2022 as women are cooking more meals at home than men worldwide. Since 2018, the survey has tracked how often people around the world prepare and eat home-cooked meals. It found that women cooked an average of 8.7 meals per week in 2022 while men cooked an average of 4.0 meals per week. As a result, the gender gap between women and men increased to 4.7 meals per week, which the survey noted is “a significant difference.”
From 2018 to 2021, the cooking gender gap was narrowing, the survey explained. Although men have consistently cooked at lower rates than women, the former made some progress in closing the gender gap over the past four years. This was likely influenced by the onset of the pandemic, Andrew Dugan, a research director at Gallup, told NPR.
“By 2021, the gap had narrowed to 4.0 meals per week (i.e., women cooked four more meals per week than men on average), compared with a gap of 5.2 meals in 2018,” per the survey.That trend, however, backpedaled in 2022: “While women’s overall cooking rates in 2022 remained steady at an average of 8.7 meals per week, this figure fell to 4.0 for men, representing a 0.7 meal drop from the year before. The cooking gender gap also varied across other major demographic groups, including employment status, household size, marital status, age and income and education levels, just to name a few.
Northern Africa had the most significant gender gap among world regions in 2022, with women cooking an average of 7.5 more meals per week than men. As for employment status, women continued to cook more often than men, regardless if they were self-employed or employed full-time or part-time. Self-employed women cooked an average of 6.7 more meals than their male counterparts per week, while women employed full time cooked 4.2 more meals on average per week.