The gender gap in cooking is widening. Women around the world cook more than men: snapshots

Worldwide, women cook nearly 9 meals a week on average, while men cook only 4, according to a new study.

Pinpak Ngamsathine/Getty Images

Hide caption

Toggle caption

Pinpak Ngamsathine/Getty Images

Worldwide, women cook nearly 9 meals a week on average, while men cook only 4, according to a new study.

Pinpak Ngamsathine/Getty Images

The gender gap in ‘home cooking’ has widened, with women cooking more meals than men in almost every country around the world, a new study has found.

Women cooked 8.7 meals per week on average in 2022. Men cooked about 4 meals per week. These are the annual results Poll conducted by Gallup and Cookpadwhich tracks how often people prepare and eat home-cooked meals in countries around the world.

When the survey began in 2018, traditional gender roles were well established, but during the pandemic years the survey results showed that men were cooking more. This narrowed the gender gap, explains Andrew Duggan, Gallup’s research director, who has worked on the poll since its inception. “Every year since the study began, the gap has narrowed,” he says. So far.

The latest results, which Duggan says were surprising, suggest a reversal of this trend. In 2022, women continued to cook at about the same frequency, but men began to cook less. On average, the men cooked just under one meal per week.

“This is the first year that the gap has actually widened,” Dugan says, noting that the gap has returned to its starting point in 2018. “What that might suggest is [that] “Traditional gender roles are beginning to reassert themselves,” Dugan says.

The gender gap varies by country. In the United States, women cook two more meals per week on average, compared to men. The survey report charts the countries with the largest gender gaps, including Ethiopia, Tajikistan, Egypt, Nepal and Yemen, where women prepare about 8 more meals per week than men.

The countries with the smallest gender differences in cooking are clustered in Europe, including Spain, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, France and Ireland. There is only one country where men cook more than women. Wait for it…..

Italy. “This is a surprise,” Dugan says.

It’s not clear why this gap has reversed, or why Italy is bucking the trend, but we’d love your thoughts. Email us at [email protected]

This story was edited by Jane Greenhalgh