TORONTO - On the days when Brent MacFadyen is home, on days off between 18-hour shifts moving drilling rigs in Alberta's oil patch, his wife says he takes over the household chores -- getting their two young daughters off to school, making sure the kitchen is spotless and doing laundry.

"But for the most part, I'm definitely the homemaker,'' says Shirley MacFadyen, who works full-time as a hospital X-ray technician in Hardisty, Alta., southeast of Edmonton.

"And when we both work, when he's done work, it's `I've worked the day and I'm done.' However, for myself, you've worked the day and now you come home and do the second full-time job.''

That's the reality in countless households across the country, and one that is changing only slowly, the latest census data released Tuesday by Statistics Canada suggests.

While the divvying up of household tasks is far more equitable than in the days when Father brought home the bacon and Mother cooked it, women still continue to contribute more time to rearing kids, doing housework and caring for aging relatives than do men.

The 2006 census snapshot of unpaid work among Canadian families shows men inched up the amount of time spent on housework over the last decade, but still lagged behind women. However, men were increasing the amount of long hours spent caring for children and parents, taking some of the burden off women.

Since 1996, the share of men participating in housework increased nationally by 3.5 percentage points to 87.9 per cent from 84.4 per cent. The corresponding rate among women held steady at nearly 93 per cent. But when it came to long hours of unpaid housework, the gap widened. Almost one in five women spent 30 or more hours taking care of the home in '06, compared to just 7.7 per cent of men.

A decade ago, 16.9 per cent of women spent 30 hours or more bathing, feeding and otherwise engaging with their kids, compared to 6.2 per cent of men. By 2006, the proportion of women spending long hours care giving decreased to 13.2 per cent, while the proportion of men jumped to 10.4 per cent.

Sociologist Donna Lero, an expert in families and work at the University of Guelph in southwestern Ontario, says that while the proportion of men contributing to unpaid household work is on the upswing, the pace of change is definitely more creep than surge.

"What we've been seeing from Stats Can data from the General Social Surveys is that increasing numbers of men are participating more in housework and in child care _ and they're spending more time in both, particularly more in the child care when there are children at home,'' Lero says.

"But it's true that women still spend more time in those roles and also have more responsibility. So they may delegate, they may plan, they may suggest to men that they do certain things, but they're still spending the mental time in that process.''

Shirley MacFayden, one of 117 Hardisty women who left their men-folk in charge of the home front as part CBC-TV's "The Week the Women Went,'' admits to sometimes "nipping'' at her husband's ear when she heads out the door in the morning.

"Now if I'm going to work and I know he's home for the day, I'll say to him, `This needs to be done, that needs to be done.' And when I get home he's done it.'' Since her husband began his current job, "the kitchen probably hasn't been cleaner, now that he's been home. He's far more meticulous that way. He'll do laundry, he'll do vacuuming,'' she says.

"But the bathroom cleaning definitely still seems to be on my list of things to do.''

Sally Aitken, the Vancouver-based director of "The Week the Women Went,'' says what she observed during filming in Hardisty (population: 743) confirms the statistics, which she believes would hold for both urban and rural communities anywhere in Canada.

"Without a doubt, absolutely, women are doing the lion's share of work around the home,'' Aitken says. "But they're also in increasing numbers in the workforce as well.''

The latest census figures show that the proportion of women in the labour force is indeed increasing over time. In 1996, 58.6 per cent of the labour force in Canada were women, compared to 60.5 per cent in 2001 and 61.6 per cent in 2006. The proportion of men has held relatively steady at about 72 per cent over the same period.

In Hardisty, where many men rely on oil industry jobs that take them from home, women by necessity pick up the slack, Aitken says. "So the women are in retail jobs, they're in the banks, they're in the hospitals, they're in the schools and they're running their kids around and they're volunteering in the community.''

Still, it's not only paid jobs, housework and looking after the kids that men and women must balance. For many among the burgeoning number of midlife Canadians, looking after aging parents and other relatives has been added to the mix.

And when it comes to elder care, the 2006 census shows an even greater disparity between the sexes: 3.9 per cent of women reported spending at least 10 hours a week on elder care, while only 2.2 per cent of men contributed that much time. That's up from 3.1 per cent of women and 1.7 per cent of men in 1996. (Overall, 20.9 per cent of women spent some time per week on elder care in 2006 compared to 15.7 per cent of men that year.)

Roderic Beaujot, a professor of sociology at the University of Western Ontario in London, believes both men and women may be underestimating time spent aiding older relatives.

"My sense is that men do more than we realize,'' he says. "Men do lawn care or fixing a light bulb that maybe is not as recognized when you simply ask them how many hours have you spent on care in the past while.''

"Similarly, women don't always report it all because they think that `I was just there talking with my mother and at the same time I did some dishes for her.' ''

"It's still true that women do more than half of that elder care. I think when you get into more intensive care, where you do bodily care and those kinds of things, women do more.''

Although the average Canadian couple is still nowhere near splitting unpaid labour 50-50, experts agree there's been a definite shift in the last few decades around attitudes towards how men and women should share the load.

In part that's due to higher education levels and earning power among Canadian women overall, which has pushed men to do more around the home, says Lero.

And as younger generations of Canadians raised by dual-earning parents enter adulthood, that evolution in work-sharing will likely gain momentum. Beaujot notes that when asked, both male and female university-aged students agree that household tasks and child care should be equally divided.

"Young people, I think, enter relationships (with) the men knowing they have to carry their weight in terms of the unpaid work because their female spouse is going to be working in the paid workforce as much as they are.''

That may be true of younger adults, but Aitken says Canadian women overall are still struggling to keep too many balls in the air.

"We are still cleaning toilets, we are still washing dishes and we are still tucking the children in and we are still working nine to five.''

"I think what is really surprising is how much women still do.''