The amount of time women spend on housework is equivalent to a salary of up to �7,500 a year, a think tank has revealed.

According to the Centre for Economics and Business Research, women spend on average 125 minutes a day doing household chores.

Women are more patient and less easily frustrated

Professor David Lewis

Women in the UK still spend more than twice as long as men dealing with household tasks, even though 12.9 million British women now have a day job.

If their toils were converted into a wage based on the average salary of a woman in full-time employment, they would receive �7,421 a year, the centre said.

A report by the Office of National Statistics published earlier this year said that if paid, UK housework was equivalent to �700bn.

'Home managers'

Despite the increase in number of women working and earning money, there has been only a small increase in the use of domestic help.

The number of women employing au pairs, window cleaners and gardeners has increased by only 7.9% over the past five years.

Psychologist Dr David Lewis, who was commissioned to comment on the results, said: "As well as having biologically evolved to nourish children and a `nest', women are much better at activity juggling and time management, making it possible for them to accomplish more tasks within a given period of time than most men.

"Furthermore, most women are more patient and less easily frustrated."

However, even though women still do double that of men when it comes to running a home, the gap is narrowing.

In the 1940s, men gave up just 15 minutes a day to running their home.

While women have halved their workloads, men have quadrupled their involvement in the home.

The CEBR also found the annual cost of running a home comes to �5,226, equivalent to about one quarter of the average householder's disposable income.