{"id":1715,"date":"2009-08-27T16:15:12","date_gmt":"2009-08-27T21:15:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/girlwpen.com\/?p=1715"},"modified":"2009-08-27T16:15:12","modified_gmt":"2009-08-27T21:15:12","slug":"global-exchange-gender-equality-in-our-day-to-day-lives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/2009\/08\/27\/global-exchange-gender-equality-in-our-day-to-day-lives\/","title":{"rendered":"GLOBAL EXCHANGE: Gender Equality in Our Day-to-Day Lives"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"As we celebrated Women\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Equality Day* yesterday, we want to talk about one of the most enduring signs of the gender equality gap — the differences in how men and women spend their time on an everyday basis. Many of you have probably heard of the term the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153double-shift\u00e2\u20ac\u009d when talking about women\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s work outside and inside the home, and anecdotally, we all have examples (\u00e2\u20ac\u0153I came home from a 12 hour work day and had to pick up his socks.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Or \u00e2\u20ac\u0153After work I had to pick up the kids, clean the house, and cook dinner.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d) The recently released American time use survey<\/a> proves what we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve known all along: women bear the burden of household work.<\/p>\n

A couple of snippets:
\n\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\tAt 5:10 pm, 17% of women are doing household activities \u00e2\u20ac\u201c 11% of men are.
\n\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\tAt 7:40 am, 11% of women are doing household activities \u00e2\u20ac\u201c 6 % of men are.<\/p>\n

Really, do check out the link \u00e2\u20ac\u201c they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve done a cool interactive chart where you can compare time use according to age, gender, race, employment, educational attainment, and size of household. Categories vary from \u00e2\u20ac\u0153household activities\u00e2\u20ac\u009d to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153eating and drinking\u00e2\u20ac\u009d to (our favorite!) \u00e2\u20ac\u0153relaxing and thinking\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. The only downside to the chart is that you cannot compare by multiple qualities \u00e2\u20ac\u201c for example, are black women doing more household activities than white women at 5:10? Then black men? What about black single mothers? And Hispanic women over 65? (You get the picture.)<\/p>\n

Internationally, feminist economists have been arguing for the inclusion of household work into overall GDP estimates \u00e2\u20ac\u201c where traditionally, the bulk of women\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s work was uncounted, as it did not take place within the marketplace. For the past few years, the United Nations Development Fund has been tracking Gender, work, and time allocation in its Human Development Report. <\/a> Although only 33 countries reported on time allocation in 2007, the results are nonetheless interesting \u00e2\u20ac\u201c globally women aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t faring that much better in balancing free time and personal care and family care.<\/p>\n

Even the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153wunderkind\u00e2\u20ac\u009d countries of Northern Europe women seem to be putting more time into the children and the chores then men. In Norway, while women and men spent approximately equal amount of time on themselves, women spent more time cooking and cleaning (2:14) than their male counterparts (0:52). Women also spent double the time (34 mins) that men (17 mins) did on childcare.<\/p>\n

In Nicaragua, a moderately developed country where interestingly even the one country where women and men have relatively equal free time women, women are the primary caregivers for the children (1:01 hours compared to the 17 mins men spent with the kids), the cooks and cleaners (3:31 hours to 0:31 mins) and less likely to be involved in market activities 28% to men\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 74%.<\/p>\n

It is no surprise that the least developed countries have the widest disparities with regards to time. Women in Benin spend much more time (8:03 hrs) on market and non-market activities combined than men (5:36 hrs). Beninese women don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have much time for themselves (1:32hrs) their children (45 mins) or their household chores (2:49 hrs) and yet they still spend more time on everything, except themselves, than their men. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m exhausted just blogging about it.<\/p>\n

Virginia Woolf spoke of the need of one\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s own room and time (and of course money) when writing fiction. And truly, all of these things are needed for most successes. Who knows how much more the world could gain from women if more men got more involved in activities beyond the market? There are signs that times are changing, however: although recent studies <\/a>do not indicate more equality in household chores, they do point to a shift in younger men’s (Gen X) attitudes and behaviors around fathering. Looks like we are one step closer to taking ALL work activities seriously, whether inside the market or out. And that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s what we call equality.<\/p>\n

* Don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t miss the National Council for Research on Women\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s tribute to Women\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Equality Day on their blog, The Real Deal<\/a>. (Full disclosure: both Tonni and I have posts up! We did them in our personal time.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As we celebrated Women\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Equality Day* yesterday, we want to talk about one of the most enduring signs of the gender equality gap — the differences in how men and women spend their time on an everyday basis. Many of you have probably heard of the term the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153double-shift\u00e2\u20ac\u009d when talking about women\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s work outside […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1915,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21104],"tags":[13676,131,8959,2715,1399,3109],"class_list":["post-1715","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-global-exchange","tag-childcare","tag-economy","tag-families","tag-fatherhood","tag-global","tag-motherhood"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1715","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1915"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1715"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1715\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}