Women and men and housework

[sun_set_bravely]

This article comes from the Women's eNews wire. It's about the American Time Use Survey that was released last week. The figures show that housework is still split along gender lines, even when both parties are full-time paid employees. Here's a link to the report itself.

The New York Times also ran an article about this report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics last week. You can read it below as well.

Interestingly enough, I couldn't find an article about it on CNN either, though I did find an article (printed on the same date that the survey results were released) about the gender gap in the office closing and women directors getting paid more.

Now, I may just be searching with the wrong words, but it's a little suspicious that I can find the article about how the glass ceiling is cracking, but I can't find the article that might suggest that men share more of the responsibility for housework.

It's 8:29 and I'm already coming up with conspiracy theories about news sources. I should get myself and Mister out to the park to play with the other doggies.

Good Monday, all.


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from Women's eNews, Sept. 18, 2004:

The Department of Labor confirmed this week what most women with paid employment have always suspected--that the household's unpaid labor still remains split along gender lines.

The new survey, called the American Time Use Survey, was released on Tuesday and revealed that working women spend more time looking after the house, family and children than working men.

Though almost as many women as men hold jobs--78 percent of women compared with 85 percent of men--the Labor Department reported that over half of all women said they did housework and almost two-thirds prepared meals on an average day, compared with only 19 percent of men who said they did housework and 34 percent who said they helped with meals or cleanup.

The study also indicates that the average working woman spends about twice as much time as the average working man on child care and household chores, while men spend more time both at their jobs and on leisure and sports.

These were just some of the survey's results, which also asked 21,000 people to record how much time they spent on things such as leisure and sports, watching TV, and attending classes in a 24-hour period. This study is the first in a new program to measure trends in how Americans spend their time on and off the job and to see how people fit work into their lives.

-- Juhie Bhatia

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from New York Times, Sept. 15, 2004

Survey Confirms It: Women Outjuggle Men
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS

WASHINGTON, Sept. 14 - It may fall into the category of Things You Knew but Could Never Prove, but a new survey by the Department of Labor shows that the average working woman spends about twice as much time as the average working man on household chores and the care of children.

The average working woman also gets about an hour's less sleep each night than the average stay-at-home mom. And men spend more time than women both at their jobs and on leisure and sports.

Those are a few nuggets from a systematic attempt by the Labor Department to measure trends in how Americans spend their time on and off the job. The results, released on Tuesday, are based on a survey of 21,000 people who were asked to record how they had spent every hour in a single 24-hour period.

The survey found that adults - some working , others not - had a little more than five hours of leisure time a day and spent about half of it watching television. By contrast, the average adult devoted only 20 minutes of leisure time to sports and another 20 minutes to "relaxing and thinking."

Labor Department officials said the survey was the first in a broad new program to track trends in how Americans use their time. Pollsters will be interviewing about 14,000 people a year, at an annual cost of some $4.5 million. The goal, officials said, is to shed light on changes in how people fit work into their lives.

"We've been measuring work for a long time, but we didn't understand the context for work,'' said the survey's project manager, Diane Herz of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. "How do people fit work into their lives? Are they doing it Monday through Friday? Is work becoming more or less prevalent on the weekends? What trade-offs are people making?"

Because the survey is entirely new, it offers no comparison with how people spent their time 10 or 20 years ago. But it does confirm that the old divisions of labor between men and women at least partly remain.

The average working woman, for example, spends about an hour and a half a day caring for other members of the family, the average working man barely 50 minutes. Likewise, the average working woman spends more than 1 hour 20 minutes on household chores, the average working man less than 45 minutes.

Almost as many women as men hold jobs, the Labor Department said: about 78 percent of women, compared with 85 percent of men. But two-thirds of all women said they prepared meals and did housework on an average day, compared with only 19 percent of men who said they did housework and 34 percent who said they helped with meals or cleanup.

"We got two different reactions from people to these results," Ms. Herz said. "Some said it proved that nothing had changed between men and women. Others were surprised that the differences weren't greater."

Comments

[freak1c.livejournal.com]

Hells yah - nothing wrong with stickin' it to the man even early.

You mentioned this ad the other day - and we didn't get a chance to talk about it...but yah - I can see where this is def. true.

I think about my old co-workers, and so many of them fall into that routine - working 8-5, grocery shopping on their break, cooking at night, cleaning, etc...it's really too damn much to be doing.

Now - there is the question of Why. It's a longer discussion really - but I have 2 propositions:

A. In practice, the work of feminists is a slow one. We're at the stage now where women can be considered for jobs and there aren't (too many) "Guy Jobs" that women can't go for as well. This is a good thing. However, as a holdover from previous (not really very long ago) times, the role of women in the home hasn't really changed. So women are left with good jobs (although not as highly paid of course) that they have a commitment to, AND the jobs of being the caretakers at home. There hasn't yet been a proposed model for how to do both, and how to rearrange the family structure so everyone is doing their job and the housework. It's something I've heard Robin say, that that choice is still very real as a woman - My Career or My Family.

B. Why would modern men buy into the old roles too? Why would a generation of men raised by women, who claim to respect and honor women not take notice of the household discrepancies? Well :

1: Hell - why would they man? It's a pretty sweet deal to get hot food when you get off work, and not have to clean it up either.

but more likely:

2. How could they? There hasn't been a re-definition of Manhood yet - of what it means to be a Man in a world where gender equality is discussed but not fully implemented. As an intelligent, hard working man, how do you find room for yourself in a discussion that has been historically about women?

I'm not sure of the answer to that one - but I think it's what we're working on daily.

[sun-set-bravely.livejournal.com]

I think you're right -- the shift in what it means to be a man hasn't happened yet, and it absolutely has to. Because the old ways don't work with the new, expansive ways of being a woman. The Patriarchy stifles and damages men in our society, too. No one should work in dead-end jobs for as many hours as most Americans do. It's not healthy, for men or women. In that second wave of feminism, when women stepped into the male roles in society, they soon realized that those male roles were just as stifling and limited as the women's roles were, but in different ways. A new paradigm has to evolve. And I think you're right -- the work that we (you, me, and every person living mindfully) do everyday is moving us toward that new place.

And it's true -- I'm happy to be working in these efforts beside you.

[nickelchief.livejournal.com]

What conclusions do you draw from this?

I would hope that a discussion of the results would take into account the element of choice. The implication is that child care and housework is something that nobody wants to do, and women get stuck with the house and kids when they'd rather be working. But I wonder how many female respondents to this survey would indicate that they enjoy cooking and spending time with their kids, and choose to do so whenever possible -- and how many overworked men would rather be at home then involuntarily stuck at the office.

Also there are a lot of variables -- spending time on "sports and leisure" sounds like a choice anybody would make -- but there's a huge difference between household drudgery (vaccuming, laundry) and fun family events (cooking, outings with the kids). It's misleading to lump it all together under "chores."

If K. and I took a survey this morning about our past weekend, you'd find that I cooked all the meals and changed the diapers and did the laundry and weeded the garden, while K. crunched numbers on a computer all weekend for work. But that meant I got to pick fresh basil from the garden and play with our daughter, and she didn't; I clearly got the better end of the deal. But that's the way her work schedule fell out this week, and we had to deal with it. If she had a choice, she'd have been doing what I was doing, diapers and all. But I wonder if this survey really reflects whether or not these things are a matter of choice.

[sun-set-bravely.livejournal.com]

One of the first conclusions that I drew from this report was that Americans (male, female, and otherwise) spend far too much time at their paid employment. I think we're way out of balance on many accounts. The fact that we only spend 20 minutes a day relaxing and thinking might have something to do with the completely unmindful directions in which our country is moving. That kind of schedule is bad for everyone involved, no matter what gender you are.

Another conclusion I draw is similar to the point that freak1c brings up: women's roles have shifted drastically (much through their own efforts) in the last fifty years, but there has yet to be a major shift in definitions of masculinity or what it means to be a man in our society. So the balance of labor is still fairly gendered in the home.

I think your point about choice and enjoyment is a good one, and it's one that surveys like this might have a hard time conveying. I'd hope that many couples are becoming successful at navigating these issues of shared responsibility and the valuable unpaid work that it takes to raise a healthy and happy family. I guess this survey's results just shows that there's still a lot of work to be done to enhance everyone's experience of life.

[fathoming.livejournal.com]

Hear hear! Amusingly to both of us, since we've always been hardcore feministas, as it happens, housework is divided exactly along classic gender lines in our household: I do all the dishes and kitchen work, all of the baking, and most of the cooking and the household cleaning, while she does the mowing and watering and such.

Some of it is indeed a question of who minds what less, but most of what I do I love doing.

I've thought a fair amount about this in terms of how it reflects on actual gender roles. Since that's not applicable here in an all-female household, I've often wondered what it means about human beings that even when it's not a gender thing, it still often seems to fall out that way.

Is it a question of different affinities for groupings of tasks that often are found together in individuals?, such as organizational tasks and creative tasks versus ... I don't know what mowing and watering would fall under, maybe outdoorsy stuff, or public-impression sorts of things, or tasks that subscribe to a perception of land as something to be made to conform to human ideals? All I know is, I loathe mowing because it's imprecise and filthy, and because of my agoraphobic tendencies.

[nickelchief.livejournal.com]

I get a kind of primal satisfaction from hauling crap to the dump, to K.'s relief.

K. loves to rhapsodize about Fiestaware while my eyes glaze over.

We are enlightened and modern and free from so much gender stuff -- and yet, there I am at the dump and there she is with her plates, and we're happy anyway.

[sun-set-bravely.livejournal.com]

This is a fascinating perspective, and I think you're onto something with your idea that there are different groupings of tasks that appeal to different people. Why do I have a mental block against cooking, but I love to bake, and why is my male partner the exact opposite? Thanks for your thoughtful response.

[nickelchief.livejournal.com]

Also, the survey doesn't really take into account the ill effects of child care on HTML coding skills, the decline of which is reaching epidemic levels in Northfield, MA.

hahaha!

[sun-set-bravely.livejournal.com]

It's all right. The survey doesn't take into account the Brooklyn dizzied-post-work-brain syndrome that has a hard time formulating an intelligent response to your excellent points. A sense of humor is requisite in these matters.