The survey of time use according to gender is harder to read than the Lisbon Treaty, writes Breda O'Brien
BEING THE type who attempted to read the Lisbon Treaty, I also diligently read Gender Inequalities in Time Use: the distribution of caring, housework and employment among men and women in Ireland. They both left me with a reeling in my head, but to be honest, the survey of time use left me longing for the simplicities of the consolidated treaty.
Let me try to explain. The headlines generated by the survey stated that women on average do 39 minutes a day more work than men. The authors state several times that this is likely to be at the upper end of the estimated extra time that women are working. Reasonably enough, the time-use diary method on which this survey is based takes account of multi-tasking, such as minding a colicky baby and listening to Gerry Ryan, while quietly waiting to go out of one's mind.
However, allowing for multi-tasking means that the day adds up to more than 24 hours, so the figures have to be adjusted. The authors say that this adjustment means that 39 minutes is likely to be at "the upper bounds" of the difference in time worked by women and men.
Another method of analysing the same time-use diary data is given as an appendix. It shows "negligible differences in total work times between the genders". The authors say that there are demonstrable problems with this second method that shows that men and women basically do the same amount of work. With tongue slightly in cheek, might I perhaps suggest that it would be safer to split the difference? Women may perhaps work 20 minutes more than men a day.
Oddly enough, the headlines did not point out that the hardest-working people in the country during weekdays are the males in male breadwinner couples.
"Male breadwinners out-work everybody during the week" is not as catchy, admittedly. Nor did the headlines state that when it comes to total "committed time", that is, time spent in paid and unpaid work, and in travel, the most egalitarian couples in the country are in the male breadwinner category. The wives' unpaid work, including at weekends, catches up on their husbands' hours of paid work. As a result, there are "negligible differences" in the total amount of time the wife and husband work in these "traditional" couples.
However, according to the theory that equality means men and women doing the same amount of paid and unpaid work each, these couples must instead be termed the least egalitarian, because the division of labour is "sharply gendered". In short, even though they work virtually the same amount of "exceptionally long" hours, they still get no brownie points. Dual-earner couples are met with much more approval, as the men do more unpaid work than the male breadwinner model, and the women do more paid work.
Now here's where my head started to hurt. Women still work longer hours overall in dual-earner couples. In fact, during the week, women in dual-earner couples work nearly as long in paid work as male breadwinners, but still end up doing more unpaid work in an average day than their male partners. So in the "less sharply gendered" couple the woman gets to work longer hours than her man, but this is apparently better? In the dual-earner couple, both the husband and wife do less unpaid work.
They subcontract out both caring and household tasks, because they don't have time to do anything else.
A key theme in equality studies is the need to value unpaid and caring work.
Not, mind you, by standing up and cheering the women who do most of it, but by making men do more of it. Why is it better and more valuable if men do half of it, than if women do most of it? And how does it add value to something if people do less of it overall? I don't mean to denigrate the painstaking and scrupulous research of the authors, but the conclusions are riddled with ideology.
For example, it is assumed that it is good if more women are in paid work, although what effect it has on the most vulnerable if more caring work has to be subcontracted as a result, is never addressed.
Just as the Lisbon Treaty in itself makes very little sense, because it is just a collection of amendments to previous treaties, there is a lot of necessary information missing from this analysis. Time use is just about how people use their time. No one was asked whether they chose to do it that way.
I am in a tiny sub-set of couples with female breadwinners. I am riddled with guilt over how little housework I do. When I expressed this to my husband, he suggested rather colourfully that I keep my own time-use diary, and explain to him how I could possibly do any more work, household or otherwise, without collapsing.
In short, our division of labour works for us, in our muddling along, often getting things wrong, kind of way.
Time after time, research has shown that women are not really interested in how much unpaid or caring work their husbands do, but in whether they consider that amount to be fair. They are also concerned about whether their own work is appreciated, and oddly enough, whether it compares well with the lot of other women.
They don't care very much at all about whether it is split 50-50. Yet the ideologues keep telling us that we have a long way to go until we reach equality.
I suspect that most married couples who are still happily together have worked out their own division of labour, and that the majority of them feel that their marriages are egalitarian, no matter what the division is.
One thing is clear from this time-use survey.
An awful lot of men and women are working very long hours, particularly in couples where there are small children. Should we not be thinking about what that does to all our lives, instead of trying to reallocate what each gender is doing?
It gains us little to pit women and men against each other in some kind of phoney war, when people are already struggling to do the best they can in a way that is fair to each other.