That’s an odd rogue stat. I have a lot of friends from France and until recently (when I moved to the country) did a lot of socializing with French people. One thing French women living in the US consistently seem to point out to me is that French men are a generation or two behind American men in terms of traditional divisions of labor and family responsibilities.

I have a young American woman friend who sat down and had a serious talk with her French husband after they decided to have a child. “Listen,” she told him. “I can live with the way you don’t help out around the house now, but after the baby? No way, buddy. Things gotta change. Or we rethink the whole family idea.”

To his credit, I think he tries pretty hard. But she tells me it’s a constant struggle to break through his decades of conditioning about house care and child care being women’s work.