Study: Women Don't Have More Work to Do, After All

(Aug. 6) -- There's a new voice in the never-ending argument of who works harder, men or women.

A new study from the London School of Economics has come up with an unexpected answer to that question, at least as it applies to Europe. Data gathered from across the European Union showed that both men and women generally put in about 8 hours of productive work -- including both paid jobs and unpaid housework -- per day.

Catherine Hakim, an LSE sociologist, said the study's conclusion "overturns the well-entrenched theory that women work disproportional long hours in jobs and at home in juggling family and work. Feminists constantly complain that men are not doing their fair share of domestic work. The reality is that most men already do more than their fair share.

"Men do substantially more hours of paid work," she adds. "Women's time is divided more evenly between paid and unpaid work."

Hakim's conclusions are, she writes, the logical outcome predicted by "preference theory" -- the notion that in a free society, people will gravitate toward the type of work they prefer to do. She predicts that "a sizable minority of women will continue to prioritize home and family life, while a majority will choose an even balance between family and paid work."

How much any of this applies to America is unclear, and Hakim admits as much, noting that "double shift," a term used to describe the dual professional-domestic burden on working women, was "invented in the United States, and automatically assumed to apply equally in Western Europe, despite our shorter work hours and widespread availability of part-time jobs." In other words, the stereotype she has debunked may have been unusually flawed, even as stereotypes go.

Oddly, Hakim finds an inverse relationship between a country's wealth and how much work women do -- richer countries, she says, demand less productivity from their women. "Results for Britain are repeated in the USA and other countries, despite differences in the length of working weeks and lifestyles. It is only in the poorer nations that women work longer hours overall. Indeed, in Sweden, Norway and the Netherlands, men actually do more productive work than women."

None of this gets into the difficulty of the work itself, and one could argue that the chief breadwinner generally gains an unfair level of financial control over the other members of the household despite contributing the same amount of effort. Even so, this study makes the case that the disparity between men and women's labors is usually just the difference between a few hours at the office and a few at home.

Maybe men and women in Europe have gotten to the point where both spouses contribute equally to a marriage and to raising children. Perhaps that is the case in America too. Unless, of course, you are at work and reading this article while your wife slaves over your children. In which case, shame on you.