The lowest on the chart is Norway, which doesn't surprise me. Generally, isn't Scandinavian culture considered to be socially progressive for gender equality?

Did you see this post at Pandagon talking about how there's a leisure gap even for college students?

This is one graph I'd really like to see error bars on. For example, is that small difference in Norway even statistically different than zero?

These studies are always skewed. There probably could be a difference in the US, just not the huge leap the chart shows.

Women create a lot of work which just simply doesn't need to be done. An average guy would probably be happy with a slightly unkempt home, if it meant a more relaxed spouse. While the average house-wife is a little more detail oriented when it comes to cleaning.

Men do work which women don't want to do and also say is play. These are just a few out of many examples:

1. More often than not, men teach kids things like how to catch/throw a ball, outdoors/camping skills, how to swim, how to ride a bike. Men's interactions with children are often degraded as just silliness - a man being a kid, not a father. A father teaching a 15 year old son how to drive never seems to count as work.

2. More of then not, men do maintenance/DIY work around the home and yard - work which often gets degraded as 'fooling around the garage'.

3. It counts as work when a woman cooks, but when a man cooks it's just a guy messing around in the kitchen, or clowning with a grill.

4. Fixing the computer would not count as work in studies like this, even it became an all day task.

Tick-tock,

1. - Actually, what happens is men take over all the 'fun' stuff to do with kids like throwing ball and teaching them how to ride a bike while the women are left with more arduous chores like feeding and bath time.

2. Where does it say outdoor/gardening work is degrated in tihs study? I like the way you're quick to 'downgrade' women's work as stuff that doesn't really need to be done but just as quick to make sure that doesn't happen to stuff that men do outside.

3. Sorry, where did this assumption come from? What about the amount of times a woman does the shopping, prep work, salads, sides, washing up etc and the man just stands at the BBQ doing the meat? There's more to cooking than just cooking, if you see what I mean

4. Again, where are you getting this information from in relation to the methodlogy of this study??

"Women create a lot of work which just simply doesn’t need to be done. An average guy would probably be happy with a slightly unkempt home, if it meant a more relaxed spouse. While the average house-wife is a little more detail oriented when it comes to cleaning."

One partner in a relationship usually has a lower tolerance for filth than the other partner. Rarely do you get two people with exactly the same standards for cleanliness. It's not fun to live in a place that's filthy and cluttered by your standards, moreso when you're constantly being told to "relax" when you try to make the place more livable for yourself.

Housework has a way of forcing attention to detail. If you just ignore the little messes, they snowball into big messes over the days of non-cleaning, until they necessitate a marathon session, often in a panicked moment before guests come over or when the messy areas get completely out of control, which makes the work more stressful and exhausting for everybody involved.

The assumptions made by Tick-Tock are ones that I would expect of someone whose experience are shaped by male privilege.

Just my observation but it seems a large portion of your articles lately focus on gender roles. I greatly appreciate this!

Though I should say these are just my own personal observations, I've noticed that my girl friends do feel more inclined to continually be doing SOMETHING into the evenings. Even if it's things like cooking, writing letters, cleaning, doing client work (horrible habit), etc.

My guy friends, are slightly more inclined to relax when the evening comes around, and give up being "chained" for defined moments. Though they do consider focusing on their hobbies and personal projects to be "leisure" time.

My hypothesis for this is that sometimes girls in our society have blurry boundaries between what work and relaxation/leisure times are during the days.

However, I do think when girls actually DO sit down to relax they relax MUCH FULLER, or prefer to fully get away. Girls (in my social circle anyway) seem to be more inclined to fully take advantage of spa treatments, workless vacations and party time when compared to the guys. This could be a skewed perspective.

I mean, obviously it's a skewed perspective. I can't generalize.

Also, by "girls" and "guys" I mean the late 20-somethings that exist within my social group.

Huh, that's funny Tick-Tock.
In my relationship, it's my partner (male) who is the more "detail-oriented", and ends up doing a lot more cleaning of the house. Also, he loves to cook, and ends up doing more of this too.
Growing up, his dad (who is a pretty sexist guy, otherwise) was a huge neat-nick, and spent a great deal of his spare time cleaning the house.
In my parents' household, my dad is the one with the cleaner sensibilities, but he doesn't do much of the work himself, but rather pressures my mom to do it.
Sounds like there's a lot of variety of experience out there that you're just bulldozing through with sexist rhetoric, huh?

Tara - Why is bathing or feeding a child arduous? It's work, but how arduous is it really?

=============

All Else -

I didn't say there wasn't a difference, I just think the difference is no longer as huge as this graph implies.

The fact is NOBODY knows how this study was done, because they conveniently don't say what they considered work. But past studies have been declared bogus because they skew what counts as work.

I NEVER said that women don't do work that counts.

I said they create more work on top of work they do. There's only so much that can be done in a home, especially with modern appliances. It's not the 1800s; life isn't that tedious unless we want it to be.

How hard is laundry? 10 seconds to load the machine. Then the machine runs itself for 40 mins. Then 10 seconds to put it in a dryer, which runs itself for an hour. Only 20 seconds of work, but 2 hours of results. Life isn't that hard nor time consuming anymore.

Vacuuming 3 times a week vs once a week - when studies show that once a week is fine.

Pre-washing dishes instead of putting them directly into the washer.

Cleaning things that are clean, or will be cleaned by a machine... that's what I mean by overly creating work.

Then there's things like obsessively cleaning before a guest arrives, as if the guest is the tidiness police.

Magnetic Crow-

I was talking averages and you know it. Averages.

Get of your high horse.

The fact is averages I speak of are true or we wouldn't be having this discussion and everything would be ideal..

Get of your high horse.

Get off your high horse.

its a shame men can't post on this board without being called sexist.

how can men enter the discussion?

is it sexist to blast men who post at this board?

or are all men the devil?

frankly if i were crow's husband I'd make her toil till she dropped

@ Tick Tock

You say that "Women create a lot of work which just simply doesn’t need to be done. An average guy would probably be happy with a slightly unkempt home, if it meant a more relaxed spouse."

It has been my understanding (though i do acknowledge that this might be inductive reasoning at best) that outsiders view "slightly unkempt homes" as reflecting poorly upon the head woman of the household and not the entire adult family.

Can soceital pressure be at least partly to blame here?

I would like to see a study done of leisure time enjooyed by a single childless man vs. single childless woman, and a single parent man vs. single parent woman. I suspect we would STILL see men enjoy more leisure time, on average.

TT: have you ever done a lick of housework?

"How hard is laundry? 10 seconds to load the machine. Then the machine runs itself for 40 mins. Then 10 seconds to put it in a dryer, which runs itself for an hour. Only 20 seconds of work, but 2 hours of results. Life isn’t that hard nor time consuming anymore."

That totally depends. You want your clothes to last and not end up some vague shade of pink? Then you have to sort loads, adjust water and heat levels, etc. And you also have to fold clothes when they are done, hang others, and put it all away. Many people iron clothing as well. And it takes FAR longer than 10 seconds to load and unload a washer/dryer. Now, granted, I am one of those who does all my clothes in one bundle and doesn't care too much if stuff gets messed up, and I don't iron. But I'm the exception to the rule for BOTH sexes, both of whom spend far more time on the task than do I

"Pre-washing dishes instead of putting them directly into the washer."
Um. Yeah. If you want dirty dishes when you take them out of the washer. Anyone who actually uses a dishwasher knows that most require you pre-rinse dishes before putting them in. Otherwise, you end up with caked on food all over all your dishes.

Oh, and most males I know are cleaner than I am, btw. Your idea that men just don't care is totally without merit.

I think Duran and Arjun Mehta make the key point here (which Tick-Tock may be trying to get at). The assumption I'm seeing here is that the leisure gap is caused by men leaving women to do the work, while they go off and play. But there could easily be other cultural issues causing the difference. You have to assume that couples define a clean home and tended children in the same way, that benefits of house and child work accrue equally to both parties and that it is possible to differentiate between work and leisure at all times.

The chart is interesting for its comparative aspects -- what is different about Italy and Norway, given an unstated but consistent set of assumptions -- but doesn't provide much information about male/female households.

Has there been a post done on male privilege yet? Tick-Tock needs one very badly!

Funny detail: the USA is the first country on the list which isn't predominantly Catholic. Don't look at me funny, I'm Spanish and those studies have been featured in our newspapers.

FWIW, my mother was aggravated whenever my sisters and I were watching TV on Saturday mornings, or just reading, instead of doing something productive like helping at home or studying.

"its a shame men can’t post on this board without being called sexist.

how can men enter the discussion?"

The same as everyone else.

Are you assuming that everyone else but you is female just because your comment didn't go over?

Tick-Tock: You’re right that we don’t know the details about this graph and should therefore take it with a grain of salt. Without statistics or data to back it up, it’s essentially worthless (though definitely a conversation starter). Your questioning the validity of the chart isn’t sexist at all.

What is sexist is your assumption that the disparity of leisure time among men and women must be the woman’s fault. You’ve also given the impression that women deserve to do more work since they’re the only ones who want to have a clean house.

@alana, it's actually this OECD report. You've got all details and spreadsheets there, if you want to play with them.

@ Elena:

Belgium is predominantly Catholic?

@rusk: At least according to Wikipedia, 75% of Belgians are supposed to be Catholic. They seem to be largely non-practising, like most Europeans, though.

@ Elena:

Thanks for the info! I was just too lazy to investigate my self

@Alana, well said.

@Duran, I have heard of a study where employed women, living with their partners, actually do more housework than single women while surprise surprise, the amount of housework the men do goes down, once they start to co-habit. And actually, single women do less housework than single men:(http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6382429.stm)

This would contradict tick-tock's assumption that it's some inherent female attribute to want things tidy.

@ Tick-tock. Many of the tasks traditionally done by men that count as "housework", i.e. mowing the lawn, taking out the trash, cleaning the garage, or playing ball with the kids, are tasks that only need to be done occasionally. The tasks associated with women--cooking, cleaning, childcare--are ones that must be done everyday or at least more regularly than once a week. It would not seem surprising that there would be a leisure time gap in such cases.

@rusk: I actually checked it before posting upthread, because I had the idea of Flemish people being more Protestant...

@Elena - Thanks for the link! Chapter 2, "Special Focus: Measuring Leisure in OECD Countries," answers most of the questions posed here about what is considered "leisure" and what is not.

Brief overview:

The approach taken here is to divide time during the day into five main categories. These five-time categories are 1) Leisure, narrowly defined, 2) Paid work, 3) Unpaid work, 4) Personal care, and 5) Other time (uses of time which are either unaccounted for or undefined).

and

“Paid work” includes full-time and part-time jobs, breaks in the workplace, commuting to the workplace, time spent looking for work, time spent in school, commuting to and from school, and time spent in paid work at home. “Unpaid work” includes all household work (chores, cooking, cleaning, caring for children and other family and non-family members, volunteering, shopping, etc.). “Personal care” includes sleep, eating and drinking, and other household, medical, and personal services (hygiene, grooming, visits to the doctor, hairdresser etc.). “Leisure” includes hobbies, games, television viewing, computer use, recreational gardening, sports, socialising with friends and family, attending events, and so on. “Other time” includes all activities not elsewhere mentioned

... and then it goes into even MORE detail about specific activities within each of those five categories.

I highly recommend reading at least Chapter 2 if you have questions. It includes a fascinating backgrounder on past studies and how they categorized of time-use.

This is a really cool study.

My "high horse" is that I and my partner have an equal relationship, that he is more observant about cleaning than I am and that we dole out housework between us, also that we don't fit his stereotypic mold? Apparently this makes him so angry that he begins calling out ad hominems, rapid-fire ('toil 'til I drop'? Is this the 1600s? And when did I ever say I have a husband?)

I note that he has absolutely no trouble with the fact that my father pressures my mother into doing far more work than he does. Also, yelling at me about anecdotal evidence! As if his is actually statistical, and not just a series of stereotypes strung together by sexist personal anecdotes!

We have no trouble with men on this board, but misogynists WILL get told.
You, Tick Tock, are a throwback.

@Arjun Mehta: What you're saying here about women's use of after-work time at home reminds me of a trend in video games that was reported a few years ago. The gaming industry discovered that among women who had previously not considered themselves gamers, they were most attracted to games that could be completed in short sessions, such as arcade games (Bejeweled, Bookworm, Solitaire), rather than a long drawn-out console game like Fallout 3, or a game where you have to keep fighting the level boss 800 times until you finally beat him.

Don't get me wrong, I know a lot of women who happily play MMORPGs and first-person shooters, but when the industry wanted to go after an untapped market, they did it by filling a niche for quckies.

And now I'm verging on a huge tangent, so I'll end with an example commercial of a leisure game marketed to women: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1L_BuzqN8jw

(and it would help to cite some of the material I mentioned, eh? Women Gamers Outnumber Men? - April 2006)

Women were found to be slightly less likely than men in the 25-34 bracket to play traditional console games on systems like the PlayStation 2 or Xbox, while they gravitated more heavily towards simple types of games like Tetris or other puzzle games and card games like solitaire.

lol - in reference to the gaming comments: I can't feel good spending more than an hour, tops, on playing a video game, as much as i DO like MMOPRGs, adventure games and the like, unless I am dog-sick, or my house is already perfecly clean. When I buy a console or PC game for myself, it's one that can be stopped and saved at any time, or one that has very short chapter segments like the Lego Wii games. This is mostly because I feel somewhat bad when I spend more time than that on a game or DVD (don't watch TV).

I can see where someone who doesn't feel a house needs to be impeccably tidy can feel that some housework is "made up". But if the other person has a higher standard of cleanliness, why are they "wrong"? Why is their desire to have a clean home so they feel comfortable not as important as their partner's desire for them to just "relax"? That almost sounds like soneone who feels their leisure time is being impinged upon by someone pestering them about helping clean... or, someone who feels slightly guilty about knowing they don't help clean as much as their partner would like.

I personally can't relax when I know there are dishes to wash (no dishwasher) or the floors visibly need sweeping, but my BF can. I never know if/when I'll have people stop by, and it DOES seem to reflect more on the woman of the house than the man when a house is less than clean.

Additionally, I mow the lawn, weed eat, take out the trash and do most of the animal care in my house... mostly because it's important to me, and I feel that even though it'd be awesome if he helped out more at times other than the impending arrival of company, I'd be doing almost as much work if I lived on my own, sans a few dishes. I feel my best when the house is clean, meaning no nagging bits of lint are in my line of sight, reminding me I shouldn't be playing a video game, and ONLY when the house is clean enough for drop-in guests can I relax.

Where does it say outdoor/gardening work is degrated in tihs study? I like the way you’re quick to ‘downgrade’ women’s work as stuff that doesn’t really need to be done but just as quick to make sure that doesn’t happen to stuff that men do outside.