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Couch EntitlementSurprise—men do just as much work as women do.

By Joel Waldfogel
Posted Monday, April 16, 2007, at 12:54 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

While men and women spend about the same time working in rich countries, women do work more than men in poor countries. And the gap widens as countries get poorer. While in the United States, which has a per capita GNP of roughly $33,000, there is no difference between the amount of male and female work, in Benin, Madagascar, and South Africa, which have a per capita income of less than $10,000, women work one to two hours more per day than men.

So, what explains the difference in the time that men and women spend working in richer vs. poorer countries? It's not a matter of women leveraging their greater earnings in places where they can earn more than men. Alas, there are no such places, and women do not reap greater market rewards in the countries where women work the most relative to men.

The authors of the new study instead think that a social norm explains men and women in rich countries pitch in to the same degree. For both men and women, number of hours of combined market work and homework varies among different regions in the United States. But the male-female work gap remains small everywhere in the country, and in this the authors see evidence of a general equality norm. For example, while people in the South work an average of 7.7 hours per day in and out of the home, and people in the East work eight hours (a daily difference of 20 minutes), the difference between the amount of time that men and women work, again in and out of the home, is only two minutes in the East and 10 minutes in the South. Similar patterns hold when you divide the data by level of education. The most educated quarter of the American population works a combined 8.7 hours, while the lowest educated quarter works 6.3 hours—a difference of more than two hours per day. But when you compare men and women in each education bracket, the difference in their total work is no more than 20 minutes.

Many women with demanding careers tell me that it is women working full-time in the market, not women overall, who work more than comparable men. This study cannot settle that question because it does not report work time separately for people with and without market jobs. But if women with careers work more than men, while women overall work the same amount as men, then women without market jobs must work less than men. Men can use that argument to hit the couch in the afternoon. Or to end up there at night.

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Remarks from the Fray:

The numbers would probably change radically depending on how you answer this: When you spend time with your kids, is it leisure or is it work? Does it matter if you're shopping, or what you're shopping for? As children grow older, they need less help and want less interaction, so does leisure increase?

In arriving at this number, someone defined child rearing, either the researchers or the diarists. As my wife tells me, "it's not babysitting when they're your kids". I imagine this kind of survey as impossible. Time spent grocery shopping or on other errands and tasks is home work when I'm alone, and leisure when my kids "help", while my wife has the opposite view.

--Sassafrass

(To reply, click here.)

I notice one very important thing that all of the grandstanding in the article glosses over: an average for a population isn't the same as what individuals experience, because the average is made up of a really wide variation in individuals.

There are a lot of couples out there that have the woman working hard both at work and at home, while the husband lazes around. There are also plenty of couples where the wife is a pampered diva in a similar vein. There's also every shade of gray in-between -- if there's slightly more of gender A individuals doing nothing, the As that do make an effort might work enough extra hours to balance them out. As the saying goes, "'normal' is just the average of a bunch of abnormalities."

All of that together (and I've certainly heard of all of it!) could easily make it look like A and B still work equal amounts, when on an individual level, there's still a lot of disparity. In order to get meaningful results, they'd have to narrow/sort the study to only compare similar couples. For all I know, perhaps they did, with the media only focusing on the "average" data because it's simpler and essentially more controversial.

--kittycalbard

(To reply, click here.)

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