Last week, we humbly requested that you spend your Thanksgiving holiday obsessively cataloging the contributions of men and women to your traditional American feasts. Fifty-four of you answered our call.

Strictly by the numbers, Thanksgiving emerged as only a slightly gendered holiday. According to your reports, women contributed a bit more to the Thanksgiving festivities this year than did men. On a scale of 1 to 5—with 1 representing utter slovenliness and 5 representing full-on kitchen assault—men averaged a contribution level of 2.8, while women averaged a 3.6. 

Your armchair gender analysis told a more complicated story.

A note on the numbers: Part of the gap may be explained by the surplus of female guests in this sample. The majority of survey respondents were women, and female-identified guests at their shindigs outnumbered male ones by a ratio of about 4 to 3 (many of you also reported spending Thanksgiving with guests who identify as queer, gay, or otherwise gender nonconforming, compromising the strict gender roles of the events). Then again, perhaps women were simply unfairly tasked with the work of completing this gender survey! The patriarchy strikes again!

But let's consult the analysis. Highlights from your reports on Turkey Day gender conforming, stereotype shattering, and snowmobile commentary:

Excuses, excuses: Many female workers chalked their dinner contributions up to personality, not gender. One woman claims she “cleaned the apartment prior to Thanksgiving guests arriving, but I think that has less to do with gender and more to do with my partner and I having SEVERELY different ideas about what constitutes ‘clean.’” Another lady reports that she cooked the bulk of the meal, “not really because of gender roles, but because I love to cook.”

Most gender non-conforming gatherings: "As far as I am concerned . . . no woman will be cooking this Thanksgiving," reports one woman, who says her contribution amounted to "just showing up" for a pre-arranged Georgia Browns dinner.

"Bought a pie. Took about five minutes. I was the only one watching football," says another woman, who spent much of the day reviewing trial transcripts while her ex-husband did the cooking. "Our day was 100% gender role reversed.”

Most gender stereotypical gatherings: At a “traditional Filipino gender-normative celebration . . . only women cooked and only women cleaned," while the men "Most sat around talking . . . several didn't emerge from the basement (playing mahjong) till the food was ready to be served."

“One of my uncles will probably not do anything," one woman reported. "My mother's boyfriend will not do anything. My brother and male cousin (ages 26 and 18) will not do anything.”

At one "gender normative nuclear and extended family" gathering, one man commented that he's "Always happy to help by staying out of the way."

"The uncle who hosts the party at his house with his wife pitches in a significant contribution in the clean-up effort, while the other men nap, drink beer in the garage and talk snowmobile and car repair, among other genderpredictable things,” one respondent wrote. The women, meanwhile, “generally work together to finish the clean-up."

Most creative interpretation of "work," female edition: “I picked out the restaurant (an hour)," reports one woman, who spent Thanksgiving with her significant other at a Korean joint. She also "came up with an excuse" to avoid dinner with her significant other's mother; that took "half an hour, approximately," she guesses.

Most creative interpretation of "work," male edition: At one gathering, an “adult male performed energy healing on two adult women guests.”

A Thanksgiving without women: One male computer programmer's Thanksgiving suffered from a lack of gender diversity. The dinner was "just me, as a vegetarian single straight male, putting together a couple different turkey alternative entrees, stuffings, gravies, vegetables, and pies," he writes. "No women involved. Sad to say." The single vegetarian reports "it took me about an hour of attentive work to prepare all the foods for today. I serve myself when each component is done and slowly grow in girth as I watch TV. . . . I do not watch sports because I hate them. The parade bores me."

TBD to the rescue: TBD's Thanksgiving gender roles quiz saved one couple from an unequal Thanksgiving. After settling on a gender-equitable work schedule—she would cook and her boyfriend would clean—one woman's gender-based conditioning threatened to upset the balance. “After dinner, I laid down on the floor for a while full of food lamenting what I had done to us all, but then I started to feel really bad that he was putting stuff away in the kitchen I had left so dirty," she reports. "I even thought, 'Later I'm going to fill out this survey, so I shouldn't do extra work
because then it will be all gender-bad.' But I was just so overwhelmed with the need to keep working, I couldn't help it. I got up and started putting food into containers." After her boyfriend insisted that she stop working, she decided instead to complete TBD's survey, preempting certain death "from biscuit exposure."

Playing the gender card: One patriarch's contributions to the Thanksgiving feast were scant: “Dad went out to buy onions," a daughter reports. "Took 15 minutes but required him to ask the supermarket person where they were (embarrassing). Also did dishes (20 minutes) but whined.” When it came time for the evening's entertainment, Dad's gender bias became explicit: “we got 'irritating' as an Apples to Apples word, and Dad put down 'women.'"

Most blatant gender policing: One female respondent brought her new boyfriend to her family gathering, where male contributions to the day including lifting "the heavy leaves to extend the table" and blowing "leaves in the backyard." When her boyfriend entered the kitchen to prepare an appetizer dip, "my stepgrandpa came up and made fun of my boyfriend— called him my shadow," she reports. "He was the only dude who helped cook stuff the whole time." The patriarch also informed the boyfriend "he should feel free to pull the 'game's on!' card if he was tired of cooking and wanted to bail."

Best showing of gender variation: "My unmarried stepbrother's activities mostly consisted of eating and being offensive," one respondent reports. "My married stepbrother spent much of his time feeding, changing, and playing with his daughter.”

Most astute gender observation: "While cooking, I jokingly gave my dad a hard time about not helping out in the kitchen," one respondent writes. "He explained that he had offered earlier, and my mom had asked him to upload some pictures for her, instead."

Uh-oh: "Was he excused from this task because he was completing another, unrelated task?" the respondent wonders. "Judging by my mom's tone, this was something she had been asking him to do for quite some time now with no results yet. He was excused from helping with this household task because of his procrastination of a previous task he had been asked to perform. In a sense, he was being rewarded with exemption from certain household duties for his shirking of other household duties."

The respondent concludes: "he has become accustomed to not having to do housework. It has, like so many privileges that certain groups enjoy, become invisible to him. . . . Despite all of his individual good intentions and his theoretical support for gender equality, my dad is enjoying the privileges of a household steeped in patriarchy."

Signs of gender-based rebellion: "The party consisted mainly of women, yet the football game was still on, even though almost none of them wanted to watch football and actively complained about it," one respondent notes. "They later staged a takeover while some of the men were out smoking and turned on Eat, Pray, Love, which was then met with equal amounts of complaining from the men.”

Most flagrant display of male privilege: "Men 1 and 2 golfed most of the day of Thanksgiving, while Woman 1 was cooking," one respondent reports. "right before dinner when everyone had arrived but not all the food had been cooked yet, Men 1 and 2 [sat] near the kitchen playing with their iPhones. . . . Man 2 brought Tupperware from home to make sure to bring
leftovers back to his place in.”