For years I’ve been hearing these claims that a United Nations study found that when you include housework and other non-compensated labor women actually work more hours per week on average than men. In fact, sometimes this claim is taken further and cited for various other purposes — for example, with claims that the additional work that women preform should be added to the GDP or that various programs that cover workers should be amended to take into account women’s undocumented work.
But Glenn Sacks did a nice job of puncturing this myth in a March 18 column, Men, Women and Work. Now certainly the work that women do is to be praised and duly compensated. Laws and traditions that kept women from working or excluded them from certain professions was not only morally wrong, but was also completely wrongheaded economically. Anyone whose ever worked with or for a talented woman must marvel at the idea that in an earlier time those talents would have been allowed to go to waste (and it is mindboggling that some nations still hamper there economies with such dubious restrictions).
But the question at hand is whether or not women work significant numbers of hours more than men, and the answer there is no. Well, at least that the studies that claim to show this are bogus.
The major source of such claims is the United Nations’ 1995 Human Development Report. This claimed that by the time you add in housework and other uncompensated work that women do, they end up working significantly more hours than men. But Sacks notes there are a number of problems with the report,
As men’s issues author Warren Farrell explained in his 1999 book Women Can’t Hear What Men Don’t Say, the UN report upon which most claims of “women work more” are based was deeply flawed. In fact, UN official Terry McKinley admitted in February, 1996 that the UN misrepresented the study in several important ways. For one, the information provided by the UN to the press only applied to countries where women were found to work more hours than men; the countries where men were found to work more hours than women were deliberately excluded.
Now there is a neat trick that more researchers would love to be able to pull out of their hats. Releasing only the data that supports a hypothesis while not including the data that contradicts a hypothesis is pretty much a ticket to ride. Sacks continues,
Moreoer, when the data provided by researchers in some countries (including the US) did not fit the UN’s intention to show that women “do more,” researchers were asked in a private communication to amend their studies. Researchers were asked to include women’s voluntary community work as well as hobbies in order to increase women’s perceived workload. Researchers were not asked to include those items or new ones in men’s labor. As a study of men and women’s labor, the UN findings are worthless.
And it’s not just the UN using such patently unsound methods. He also takes to task UC Berkeley professor Arlie Hochschild’s 1989 book, The Second Shift which claimed that “women work an extra month of 24 hour days each year.” Holy cow — is there even enough time available for such an enormous disparity? Well there is if you compare two very different groups of men and women. Sacks writes,
For one, she compared the housework burdens of full-time employed males with those of part-time employed females, portraying men working 50 hour weeks as lazy and selfish for not doing as much housework as their wives who were working a 20 hour week. Also, she claimed that men did no more housework in the late 1980s than in the prefeminist era, but, with one minor exception, she used data on male housework from studies done in the pre-feminist era, rendering it worthless [as a source for late 1980s male housework trends].
In the United States, Sacks reports, men in act work 3-5 hours per week more than women on average. That’s actually a pretty amazing figure, especially if it includes women who have temporarily altered their workload after having children. Lets have three cheers for America — where everyone is entitled to work 50 hours a week regardless of their sex!
Source:
Men, Women and Work. Glenn Sacks, Mens News Daily, March 18, 2003.