Next time you grudgingly reach for the vacuum cleaner, spare a thought for Italian women.
Women from Malta's northern neighbour spent a disproportionate amount of time doing housework over the past 50 years, researchers at the University of Oxford have found.
Italian women had it bad twice over, with chores seemingly a zero-sum game: not only did they do more housework than women from 18 other countries studied, but they had to put up with men who did less than their counterparts anywhere else, too.
In 1980, Italian women did just over 4 hours more housework than men every day. By 2008, the difference had declined to just over 3 hours.
Not that Spanish women have had it much better. The study found that as recently as 2002, women there were still doing an average of 3 hours more housework than men every day.
In the UK, men have consistently increased their share of housework over the past half century. In 1961, women there did an extra 195 minutes of housework every day. By 2005, the disparity had fallen to 74 minutes.
Scandinavian countries emerge as the most egalitarian, though even there a disparity still exists. Women in Norway, Finland and Denmark do just over an hour more housework than men, the study found.
Researchers analysed 66 different time use studies conducted between 1961 and 2011 to come up with the data.
They found that while there is an evident trend towards gender equality, progress seems to have slowed down during certain periods.
"There may be limits to the equality in housework that can be achieved under current social policy, management culture and gender ideology constraints," researchers concluded.
While the study did not include Malta, a 2006 study commissioned by the National Commission for the Promotion of Equality suggests that when it comes to household chores, local women are more Italian than Danish.
The study asked schoolchildren which of their parents did the housework. 80 per cent said their mother washed the clothes, 44 per cent said their father never cooked and just 1.4 per cent said their fathers sometimes washed the floor.