The way services market themselves can tell you an awful lot — including how little things have actually changed for women.

A pack of male Uber and Lyft drivers jockey outside Instacart’s San Francisco headquarters as the women who summoned them try to figure out whose driver was whose. They’ve just left a Women in Wireless shindig called Outsource Your Life: I Can’t Live Without These Apps: Hailing an on-demand man servant seemed the natural thing to do.

And it was true. These women couldn’t live without these apps — or at least they didn’t want to. Women who work for on-demand apps were pitching other women on how using their service could make life easier.

Two women from Instacart told us that 65 percent of their customers are women: The majority of those in the 40-person audience raised their hand to show they used the app for grocery deliveries. Shyp’s head of marketing told us that its customers skew “highly female” (about 60 percent) and then declared her love for Instacart, Sprig, and Uber. She looked nervous when the Woman in Wireless moderator showed a video about how she’d used Shyp to send an intact eggshell to Los Angeles. Everything got there in one piece. People applauded. Shyp relaxed.

Here I was, surrounded by so many professional women in power pumps, minidresses, and long wavy blonde hair. It was basically a whole room of Peggy Olsons, plus 50 years of progress. So how do the apps play into these women’s lives? Do they aid that progress? Were these apps truly some sort of fourth wave feminism, enabling women to outsource patriarchal shackles by smartphone?

The answer may be in the advertising. After all, the way today’s Mad Men draw up the ads for these services can tell you a lot about their target markets. For example, GrubHub has become the king of male slacker ad. The company told me its customers split almost perfectly 50–50 gender-wise. Still, men are 55 percent more likely to do orders after 10 p.m. — supreme bachelor behavior. (As is playing video games versus a slice of pizza and sleeping sans pants on your couch. You get the feeling the delivery guy isn’t replacing so much a girlfriend as their mom.)

That’s fine for single professionals with no live-in partner, but what about once people are coupled up? A project manager from Yahoo! named Eulalie told me about her love for Instacart. “It’s like a vicious circle,” she said: If you don’t have any groceries, you go out to eat, and if you go out to eat, you never make it to the grocery store. But she admitted the household chores in her house were still very pink/blue, gender-determined — weeknight cooking still falls largely to her, while her husband pitches in with handy work. She estimated she puts in four hours of chores a week to her husband’s two.

That’s nowhere near the chore breakdown of the Don Draper days, though it’s still familiar enough in 2015. Study after study shows chores are the ingrown toenail in women’s progress: working women still do a disproportionate amount of household chores.

Now, outsourcing those chores seems to be falling to women, too — either by choice, obligation, or some unconscious melding of the two. Eulalie told me she’s the one who clicks through Instacart’s listings for the insta-ingredients. She’s the one who hires the cleaners to dust every other week. Alfred, meanwhile, told me 60 percent of its customers for its home personal assistant app were women—nearly the same as Instacart and Shyp. Why?

Shyp says early adopters fall into three categories: online returns, online storefront sales like eBay or Etsy, and gift senders, but don’t have easy answers on why those tend to be women (“Women are more generous or give better gifts?” speculates the company’s spokesperson Johnny Brackett. “We don’t have scientific research on that.”)

The sites of the food delivery services like Munchery and Sprig are pretty gender agnostic. But the advertising minds over at Homejoy — with 70 percent of its customers women — were less subtle. The cleaning app’s website shows a happy female customer relaxing in a clean house.

Homejoy also upsells the ladies on a cute guy-next-door who could do some handyman services (he’s even wearing Chippendale overalls). The gender implication is clear.

Handy, meanwhile, shows a carefree lady walking through her spotless kitchen with her head held high. Message: that grime that may have been there before? Not my problem.

If you added up the cost of all these mommy apps — cooking, cleaning, laundering, post office runs, Shuddle-ing the kiddos to and from their piano and acrobatics lessons — you could estimate the salary my mom should have earned as a stay-at-home mom for the better part of 30 years. As Tracy says, this comes with a prohibitive cost barrier to most. In the same way that many mothers stay home with kids because daycare would cost nearly their entire salary, anyone with earnings short of Sheryl Sandberg’s probably couldn’t afford the entire on-demand mom complement to replace themselves.

But the ads want you to indulge in the dream. And the message is remarkably unchanged since the days women rocked petticoats.

Check out this ecstatic lady! Before the smartphone, there were washing machines. This 19th century ad promised to turn “Blue Monday” into a “Bright and Happy Day”:

Here’s a “Mad Men” era ad with the same message:

And here’s Washio’s advertising itself today — doing away with Blue Monday just the same, although this time the dial has morphed into a smartphone app. Now the guy gets involved with pressing the button! One point gender equality.

Similarly, in the 1950s, the newfangled dishwasher liberated women “from apron strings” for “other pleasures.” You know, like joyously hosting children’s birthday parties:

Sadly, the freedom was but a mirage, since the domestic scene obviously hadn’t improved much by the 1970s, when a young woman was still contemplating her life washing glasses until she is ravaged by wrinkles and unfortunate bowl cuts:

The on-demand economy has one-upped those appliances. No longer do you need a washing machine: You can just a hire someone to whisk the clothes away in the first place. Be gone dish-washing — now you outsource the cooking itself to a third party and compost the Munchery box. The underlying selling point to women that services can liberate them from domestic drudgery remains.

Perhaps the only a difference is what that free time goes towards: The time to throw children’s parties is now time to chill with your man friend at the park.

After all, as Tracy points out, these companies, just like their ads, are not in the business of rewriting gender roles — they’re about selling to the gender roles as they exist in the world. And it sure looks like women, if not doing the chores, are the ones delegating them.