Is women’s ‘double-shift’ a myth?
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Like many couples, my partner and I argue about housework on a regular basis. But according to new research, my perceived ‘double-shift’ of work and housework is a myth. Catherine Hakim, a sociologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), argues that:
We now have a much more specific and accurate portrait of how families and individuals divide their ‘work’ and this data overturns the well-entrenched theory that women work disproportional long hours in jobs and at home in juggling family and work. Feminists constantly complain that men are not doing their fair share of domestic work. The reality is that most men already do more than their fair share.
These findings are based on the results of time use surveys, which ask people to record what they do with their time. The results show that once the number of hours people spend doing paid jobs and unpaid household work are added together, women and men do roughly equal amounts of work – about eight hours a day. Men do more hours of paid work, while women divide their time more evenly between paid and unpaid work. Only when both partners have full-time jobs and no children at home, do women work more hours than men.
While men and women may put in similar hours overall, it’s not clear that men are doing their fair share of work around the house. Instead, the results suggest that when couples start families, men spend more time working outside the home and women scale back on paid work to make time for housework and childcare. According to the results of the UK 2000 Time Use Survey, on average, men spend one hour and 17 minutes longer than women on paid employment per day, while women spend over an hour and a half longer than men on housework.
Perhaps women’s perceived ‘double-shift’ reflects the challenges of juggling work and family life, regardless of the actual hours involved. In other words, four hours of work followed by four hours of kids, laundry and vacuuming can sometimes be more physically and emotionally demanding than an eight-hour day at the office. Does focusing on how many hours men and women spend ‘working’ tell the whole story?
Hakim argues that how work is divided comes down to lifestyle preference, not gender. People are either work-centered, home-centered, or want to combine work and family (adaptive). According to her research, most women are adaptive, while most men are work-centered. But, she points out, more men are demanding work-life balance and family-friendly employment benefits. This is good news for the future, given the aging and demographic change ahead. Employers around the world will soon be facing serious labour shortages and looking for ways to best attract and retain talented employees. Building a flexible workplace that offers employees choices about which hours they work, how many hours they work, and where they work is one way to address this challenge. It also gives both men and women options to balance the needs of work and home, and to ensure that both partners are doing their fair share – in and outside of the home.
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2:32 pm
I find it interesting that the study is UK based. Can the findings necessarily be applied to North Americans? From my experience in New England and Nova Scotia, I think not, but perhaps it is also age related more than continent specific.
7:49 am
I don’t know why anyone continues to feed Hakim’s ego. The problem is that this researcher, frankly, has very little credibility. Not even with academics who don’t consider themselves feminists. But gender theorists look at her methodology and the conclusions she draws, and shake their heads. If she’s going to have a contrarian view, she should at least be rigorous in her research. Dig deep into it and ask questions. Then look at her “new” theories on “erotic capital” and draw your own conclusions (I’ll give you a hint: it’s ridiculously simplistic and anachronistic). There’s a good reason why she’s rarely (if ever?) asked to lecture at LSE.
5:55 pm
In the report, the author claims that results for Britain are repeated in the US and other countries, even when differences in lifestyles and the length of working weeks are taken into account. While the paper doesn’t back these claims up with numbers, the results of the American time use survey are available online. In 2009, employed men worked 56 minutes more than employed women (among full-time workers, men worked 8.3 hours compared with 7.5 hours for women). On days that they did housework, women spent an average of 2.6 hours, while men spent 2.0 hours. Women also spent more time on childcare than men. When you add it all together, women and men spend an approximately equal number of hours “working”, but men spend more time doing paid work and women spend more time doing unpaid work.
I think this reflects my own relationship, since we both put in similar hours overall, but I spend a little more time on housework and my partner spends a little more time on work related to his career. I’d like to see men and women contributing equally to work inside and outside of the home, not just work overall.
6:45 pm
This research strikes me as something that misses the obvious, isn’t saying that women are more “adaptive” and men more “work-centered” a clear reflection of what society’s expectations are for each gender? So it is not so much that women objectively choose to be “adaptive” but that societal pressure on a mother,and not always very friendly family policies in the work place, force women into this situation. Same goes for men who are expected to be “providers” and even if they want more family time, may feel like the pressure to bring home the bacon is just too strong to challenge. It is wonderful that men (and women I know)are fighting for more family-work balance, but on the whole the expectation that a woman should be more involved in her family (at the expense of her paid job) than her male partner is still alive and well. As one other commenter mentioned, it is important for each of us to fight for that balance so that both men and women, who are partnered or married, take the time to feel fulfilled in their paid careers as well as in the home with their loved ones.