The male Instacart shopper problem is deeper than groceries
About once a week, I see a familiar sentiment pop up on social media.
The posts show women lamenting a particularly mind-boggling decision made at the grocery store by a male Instacart shopper.
Cheese substituted for a pack of raw chicken. Five bunches of bananas instead of five bananas. Ice substituted for a dish scrubber and on and on. Usually under the post is an outpouring of people showing their own receipts and sharing similar stories.
I don't believe in gender essentialism, or that there is anything innate in women and men that make it so that it's more "natural" for women to be better at domestic work or childcare. What the Instacart example reveals though is that household labor, like grocery shopping, is subjected to the same dynamics that underpin the gender imbalance in unpaid household work overall.
I have had similar experiences with Instacart, the most recent at the Asian American Journalists Association convention a few weeks ago where I was trying to buy specialty Asian snacks for our recruitment booth and had more than half my order refunded or left off vs. substituting a similar item as was requested. What was left of the delivery was then dropped in the middle of the hotel lobby where it was later discovered in the lost and found.
Several women Instacart customers have gone so far as to say the app should have a "female shopper" only option, like Uber now does but for very different reasons, to reduce the amount of wasted time and frustration that comes from shoppers who can't locate items in the store.
Instacart said in a statement that 60% of their shoppers are women and that all shoppers receive ongoing training. Instacart shoppers overwhelmingly provide high-quality service for customers, with more than 100 million five-star ratings received by shoppers last year, they said.
On average, women in heterosexual relationships spend twice as much time as men on household work and childcare, according to a report by the Gender Equity Policy Institute. Married women without children spend 2.4 times as much time as men doing household work.
This disparity applies to married women who work full time as well, who still do 1.8 times as much household labor as men who work full time. These differences persist even when both earn similar amounts, they reported.
Interestingly, 77% of people in the U.S. believed children were better off if men and women were equally responsible for work and caring for the home, Pew reported, but clearly that's not happening in most households.
A 2025 study published in the National Bureau of Economic Research titled "Winning the Bread and Baking it Too: Gendered Frictions in the Allocation of Home Production," found that even when men have zero earnings, such as during unemployment, most of their free time goes to leisure activities rather than household chores.
While the study said some researchers attribute the disparity to "comparative advantage," or the idea that when one person does more of something they get better at it, I would argue that another way to look at it is "weaponized incompetence," where you continue to be so bad at something that is not fun to do you necessitate your partner picking up your slack.
The study said that the added burdens for women in the home contributed to the ratio of women's pay relative to men's declining for the second year in a row.
It's not just the household labor, but it's also the mental load or cognitive labor that women end up disproportionately shouldering in "anticipating household needs, identifying options to fulfill these needs, choosing between options, and monitoring whether needs have been successfully met," as one research paper put it.
Take, for example, grocery shopping: In addition to physically going to the grocery store, it requires keeping track of when household essentials are running low and meal planning, then making a list accordingly and making sure those items are acquired. A USC study found that mothers reported doing 73% of the cognitive labor in their heterosexual, two-parent household.
Decades after the sexual revolution and women's liberation movements supposedly shifted our culture to one where women had more freedom of choice over their own lives and bodies, these inequities stubbornly persist, leading to, I would guess, a dynamic where men are less experienced in household shopping and less able to successfully shop for others as well. I think there is also an element of disrespecting the skill and capability required to do this work well.
These disparities are a function of persistent gender norms, societal expectations and also structural dynamics unique to the U.S., where support for childcare, in particular, is woefully inadequate.
The U.S. is a stark outlier compared with other high-income countries in the amount we provide in childcare support and other family benefits, the Gender Equity Policy Institute reported, noting that family benefits make up 2.4% of Germany's GDP, for example, where in the U.S. it is just 0.6%. And childcare costs in the U.S. are astronomical.
As Corinne Low, one of the 2025 study authors said in an article about their report, "We need a second gender revolution," she said. "The first was women entering the workforce and taking on these roles; the second is men stepping up at home and sharing chores equally."
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