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It is what most married men want to know – how to get more sex. But the answer may well be enough to dampen their ardour: do the housework.

Dusting, vacuuming and even taking out the rubbish are the best ways to rekindle the marital flame, according to a US study of family life.

“Equitable sharing of housework is associated with higher levels of marital satisfaction – and sometimes more sex too,” said Joshua Coleman, a psychologist and a senior Fellow at the Council on Contemporary Families, which commissioned the report. “Wives report greater feelings of sexual interest and affection for husbands who participate in housework.”

Scott Coltrane, a sociologist at the University of California and a coauthor of the report, agrees. “By and large, the more men do around the house the happier women are. We sociologists generally don’t go there, but therapists say there’s a correlation.”

The revelation will not come as a surprise to women, who have long fantasised about lovers who do the housework. A US group called the Cambridge Women’s Pornography Cooperative recently published a book titled Porn for Women, which features pictures of hunky apron-clad men doing such everyday tasks as hoovering the house.

Heather Peterson, of the cooperative, said that men who engaged in “chore-play” were likely to get more sex. “We are so excited that the studies are giving us data to back up what we knew all along,” she said.

The study rejects the conventional wisdom that, despite gains in education, work, and politics, women face a “stalled revolution” at home. Women in Britain may find it hard to believe, but time-use studies in the US suggest that men’s contribution to housework has doubled since the 1960s from about 15 per cent to more than 30 per cent of the total. Over the same time, the average working mother has cut her weekly housework by two hours.

“There has been a growing convergence in the hours that women and men spend in the broad categories of paid work, family work and leisure,” the study says. “Women’s paid work time has significantly increased, while that of men has decreased. Correspondingly, women’s time devoted to housework has decreased, while the time men spend in family work of all kinds has increased.”

Men have tripled the amount of time they spend on childcare since the mid1960s, and women also spend more time with their children.

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