Employed married women work less, sleep more, and socialize more than their husbands, and that’s fine
Timothy P. Carney
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Did you know that married women who are employed sleep about 1.5 hours more each week than married men who are employed?
Did you also know that married employed men ages 25 to 64 work about 44 hours a week on average, while married employed women of the same age work only 39 hours a week?
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Working wives also socialize 20% more than working husbands.
These are three data points that the Pew Research Center collected from the American Time Use Survey. If you saw Pew’s report on the data, though, you probably saw it as a story of lazy husbands and lazy fathers.
Here’s a feminist tweeting about another gender gap, but it’s not the sleep gap:
Here’s a story on the Pew data that focuses on “how much more free time husbands have than their wives.”
I deliberately wrote my headline to capture only half the story on time-use differences. One wonders whether the folks at Fast Company were also being deliberately provocative.
Pew itself also frames the story as one about men having much more leisure time.
Robert VerBruggen has written a couple of times on this media phenomenon, the myth of the “Lazy Dad,” and he’s used the same data to show that if you count paid work, housework, and taking care of the children, men and women basically work the same amount of time.
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You could argue that women spend their free time better — sleeping and socializing are better than watching TV, in my opinion — but that’s not good feminist clickbait.
There’s interesting stuff in these data points, and I’m glad Pew collected them. They highlight cultural and natural differences between men and women. I just wish we didn’t all feel the need to frame everything as a battle of the sexes.