Not enough hours in the day
I don’t know anyone who thinks they have enough time to do everything they want to, especially not working parents. The US government just released the first analyses from its new time use study, which attempts to figure out exactly what we’re all doing with the 24 hours a day we get.
As the New York Times points out, it didn’t exactly require a multi-million dollar study to tell us that on average, women do more housework and more child care than men. I’m also not exactly shocked to learn that employed mothers get less sleep on average than non-employed mothers.
They haven’t released the underlying data yet, but there’s still some interesting data in the appendix tables that they did publish, especially Table 6, which breaks respondents out by gender, employment status, and whether there are children of different ages in the household. I immediately turned to employed women, with children under age 6:
Caring and helping for household members (as a primary activity): 2.42 hours a day, versus 3.14 hours a day for non-employed women with young children in the household. That gap is actually quite small, in my opinion, but it’s consistent with previous research suggesting that employed mothers cut out sleep, housework and personal time, rather than giving up time with their children. (Table 8 says that women in households with children under 6 spend an average of 6.94 hours a day caring for household children as a “secondary activity,” while doing something else, but this isn’t split by employment status. First thing on my list of things I’d like to see analyzed when the public use data comes out.)
(By contrast, the numbers for primary care are 1.28 for employed men with young children in the household and 1.23 for non-employed. My guess is that means that non-employed men with children at home are still more likely to be home because they’re disabled or otherwise unemployable than because they’re choosing to take on child care responsibilities.)
Working: 4.34 hours a day. I think these figures include weekends, so this works out to about 30 hours a week. Women, especially those with young children, are more likely to work part-time than men, but Table 4 also shows that women working full-time work an average of about 2/3 of an hour per day less than men working full-time.
Personal care activities (including sleeping, showering, makeup, etc): 9.23 hours a day, less than non-employed mothers of young children, but more than employed men. I guess women really do take longer to get dressed.
Eating and drinking: 1.06 hours a day, exactly the same as non-employed mothers of young children. The key thing to note here is that at any given time respondents were only allowed to indicate one activity (except for childcare), so all the times that you eat while driving, working, watching tv, etc. don’t show up in the survey. Someone who works on the study told me earlier this year that when they were testing the instrument, they discovered that a significant number of people didn’t report any eating in the course of the day because it was never their primary activity.
Household activities (e.g. housework, cooking, etc.): 2.00 hours a day, substantially more than any group of men, employed or non-employed, with or without children, but less than non-employed women. A clean house and homecooked meals are among the things that get sacrificed to the time crunch. Interestingly, mothers of young children, regardless of employment, did slightly less household activities than mothers of only school-age children. Shopping is a separate category, coming in at 0.9 hours a day
Leisure and sports: 3.25 hours a day, the lowest of any of the subgroups reported. This is actually higher than I would have guessed. However, this figure has to be read in conjunction with Table 8, which says that women with children under 6 spend an average of 2.43 hours of leisure a day in conjunction with child care. The overall pattern for this one is pretty clear, with men consistently reporting more leisure than women, non-employed more than employed, people without children more than people with children, and people with only older children more than people with young children.
October 19th, 2004 at 3:21 pm
It’s a real dilemma for women. We are seen as the primary care givers like it or not, the private sphere of life has always be deferred to the female and the public to the male. In order to change the distribution of labor in the household, women will have to assume more leadership in the public sphere so that this isn’t primarily a “man’s world” anymore. Men will have to assume more responsibility for home and children. Perceptions need to change and women need more institutionalized help with raising their kids. Universal childcare would be a great start, reduction of work hours for parents and everyone would help, telecommuting, etc. Encouragement of work-life balance for males and females, and a change in the idea of men being defined soley by the work they do. On the flip side of this women need to change the idea that woman automatically equals mother. We are more than just wombs waiting to be filled up, but people first.