A few years ago, Sarah Cortell Vandersypen was feeling “so overwhelmed with everything.” So, she decided to type it all up.

The fundraising professional and mom of one created a spreadsheet and entered every chore and child-care responsibility she could think of: taking out the trash, making her daughter’s bottles, replacing empty paper-towel rolls. She marked who was doing what—her or her husband—color-coding as she went (green for “frequently,” red for “rarely”), and created a separate column to denote how time-consuming...

A few years ago, Sarah Cortell Vandersypen was feeling “so overwhelmed with everything.” So, she decided to type it all up.

The fundraising professional and mom of one created a spreadsheet and entered every chore and child-care responsibility she could think of: taking out the trash, making her daughter’s bottles, replacing empty paper-towel rolls. She marked who was doing what—her or her husband—color-coding as she went (green for “frequently,” red for “rarely”), and created a separate column to denote how time-consuming the task was.

When the list was done, by her tally, she had 22 items marked green. Her husband had 14.

“It was validating,” says the 34-year-old, who lives outside Baton Rouge, La.

Women have long carried more of the domestic load. For some couples, the pandemic—with its endless dirty dishes, cluttered makeshift home offices and classrooms, and plenty of time indoors to notice every speck of dust—widened the gap.

Both men and women ramped up the average time they spent on household activities in 2020, according to the American Time Use Survey, men by 16 minutes a day and women by 11. But overall, women did far more—2.4 hours daily, compared with 1.6 for men. Meanwhile, the percentage of men doing housework and food prep each day decreased from 2019 to 2020, while the percentage of women doing those things increased, according to the survey, from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“I did not see men doing it all,” says Eve Rodsky, the author of “Fair Play,” a book about dividing up housework more equitably. She has interviewed 75 couples via Zoom during the pandemic. The women are burned out, stressed and full of rage about unequal distribution of domestic labor, she says. The men are finally starting to wake up to the problem.

“There’s no denying it anymore,” Ms. Rodsky says. Many male partners have spent much of the past 18 months working from home, with a full view of labor that was formerly invisible.

Who does what

Of course, some men have always taken on more housework than their female partners. Other people struggle with roommates, are carrying the weight of the household themselves as single parents or are in same-sex relationships where disparities don’t have anything to do with gender.

Ms. Rodsky recommends households of all kinds evaluate which obligations they actually need in their lives, and which feel superfluous. (Is your child’s travel soccer league—and every item it adds to your to-do list—worth it?) Figure out a joint “minimum standard of care” for the stuff that remains. (What does a tidy kitchen look like? How often does the cat’s litter box need to be cleaned?)

When you divide up chores, make sure one person is responsible for the entirety of the task—so that the other person is completely freed from having to think about it at all. If dad makes dinner, for instance, it’s also his job to pick a recipe and make sure the ingredients are on hand.

“It’s that idea that ‘I trust you,’ ” Ms. Rodsky says.

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After Kerry O’Keefe ramped up her work hours last November to try to contribute more to her family financially, her husband acknowledged she was still doing the brunt of the household tasks. Then, she says, he would ask: “What can I do?”

“I was like, ‘What can you do? How can you not see? How do you not know? Why do I have to be your manager?’ ” says the Sacramento marketing professional.

They talked it out over a date this summer and were able to divvy up responsibilities more fairly, splitting school drop-offs and early-morning wakeups for their two children. He has continued checking in with her to see how she’s feeling about everything that is on her plate.

“It’s like the most sexy thing he says to me,” she says.

But she still feels the mental load of the household on her shoulders, weighing her down and distracting her. “There’s so many details always running through my head,” she says.

The breakdown

Nearly 80% of mothers said they were the one primarily responsible for their family’s housework, according to an April 2020 survey analyzed by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, New York University and the University of Texas at Austin. That is compared with 28% of fathers.

The researchers also found that when mothers were the only parent working remotely, 76% of them reported spending more time on housework. When only dad stayed home, 43% of men said the same.

“There’s this interesting asymmetry,” says Jerry Jacobs, a University of Pennsylvania sociologist and co-author of the study. “Gender’s just so deeply ingrained in so many situations.”

Joshua Coleman, a San Francisco Bay Area psychologist and author of the book “The Lazy Husband: How to Get Men to Do More Parenting and Housework,” says couples he works with often want, and start out having, egalitarian relationships. Then they have children, and it all falls apart.

Solving the problem begins with talking about it, he says. Don’t broach the conversation when you’re resentful. Start with a compliment, to show you’re allies. And don’t frame the issue as a criticism or character flaw. Instead, describe how it makes you feel when your partner leaves the pans in the sink overnight after promising to wash them.

When Felicia Gonzalez’s fiancé, Jason Gogel, moved into her Westborough, Mass., home earlier this year, he brought with him a lot of stuff, and a more lackadaisical approach to chores.

The 36-year-old volunteered to take on laundry, but he wasn’t into folding it. Baskets of wrinkled clothes languished around the house.

“I was falling into the ‘Well, he didn’t do it the way I’m used to’ ” trap, says Ms. Gonzalez, a single mom who had spent years establishing a rhythm around housework with her 8-year-old.

Mr. Gogel felt like Ms. Gonzalez’s standards were too high. “If I can’t do it right, I’m not going to do it,” he says he sometimes found himself thinking.

Once Ms. Gonzalez explained why folding the clothes promptly was important to her, he stepped up. Together, they used the Marie Kondo method to declutter and divided chores by what they were good at and liked. Mr. Gogel, for one, finds vacuuming cathartic.

“Speak up,” Ms. Gonzalez advises. “Ultimately, our partners are not mind-readers.”

Ms. Feintzeig writes The Wall Street Journal’s Work & Life column. She can be reached at rachel.feintzeig@wsj.com.