Today I’m back to looking at the American Time Use Survey. Let’s take a look at the differences between sexes when it comes to time spent on various activities. The table below lists the main activity categories, with the average time spent (in minutes, per day) by women and men, and the difference (positive difference means women spend more time, negative means men do). This covers the years 2003-2023.1The pandemic year of 2020 is skipped for two reasons: people’s activities were very different, and data collection was interrupted during the lockdown
| Activity | Women | Men | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Personal Care | 584.6 | 558.9 | 25.7 |
| Household Activities | 137.0 | 86.0 | 51.0 |
| Caring for and Helping Household Members | 41.2 | 20.4 | 20.8 |
| Caring for and Helping Non-Household Members | 13.9 | 10.7 | 3.2 |
| Work and Work-Related Activities | 176.2 | 258.0 | -81.8 |
| Education | 28.1 | 26.9 | 1.2 |
| Consumer Purchases | 41.3 | 29.7 | 11.6 |
| Professional and Personal Care Services | 9.0 | 5.4 | 3.6 |
| Household Services | 1.2 | 1.4 | -0.2 |
| Government Services and Civic Obligations | 0.5 | 0.6 | 0.0 |
| Eating and Drinking | 70.8 | 74.8 | -4.0 |
| Socializing, Relaxing, and Leisure | 274.7 | 305.5 | -30.8 |
| Sports, Exercise, and Recreation | 16.8 | 28.7 | -11.8 |
| Religious and Spiritual Activities | 11.1 | 7.9 | 3.3 |
| Volunteer Activities | 9.7 | 8.2 | 1.6 |
| Telephone Calls | 9.2 | 4.4 | 4.8 |
(A detail about travel time in this footnote:2The ATUS has a separate category of activities for “travel”. But travel is almost always associated with another activity. We travel to work, or school, or to the grocery store. The survey notes the activity associated with each travel event. For today’s analysis, rather than keep Travel as a separate category I’ve merged the time spent travelling into the related category. For example, if someone reported working 8 hours, and spending 45 minutes commuting to/from work, I’ve totaled this as 8 hours 45 minutes of “work activity”. This better reflects the time associated with that activity.)
Where are the differences between the sexes? The biggest is Work – men spend 82 minutes more per day on employment activities. A higher percentage of men are employed, and they tend to work longer hours.
Women spend more time on what you might call “support” activities: Household activities (51 minutes more), shopping (12 minutes), caring for others (24 minutes) are the major categories here.
Personal Care is an interesting category. This is basically two activities: sleeping, and grooming. Women sleep 10 more minutes a day than men – there are physiological reasons for this. They also spend 15 minutes more a day grooming. That’s a choice, but it’s one influenced by sociological expectations (i.e., men are allowed to be slobs more than women).
Men spend 12 minutes more a day exercising. They also spend 26 minutes more in the Socializing, Relaxing, and Leisure category. Actually, it’s +31 minutes, but women spend 5 minutes more on Telephone Calls. Most of these calls are with friends and family, so it’s probably safe to call them “socializing”. So that brings men’s advantage down to 26 minutes. We’ll call these activities (Socializing/Relaxing/Leisure plus Telephone Calls) the Fun category.
Summing it all up: Men are employed 82 minutes more per day. But women more than make it up with their household support activities. Men get 26 more minutes of Fun time; counterbalanced by women getting 10 more minutes of sleep (a biological necessity) and spending 15 more minutes washing, dressing and grooming.
Let’s adjust for the fact that men work more. In addition to the detailed activity log, the ATUS asks for demographic information about the respondent and their partner (if they have one). This demographic information includes the typical number of hours worked per week, and their salary (for both members of the relationship).3Income from those who are self employed is not reported, and thus is ignored here. I ran the numbers for those couples who report the identical number of hours worked in a typical week. Despite working the same amount of time, women still contribute more of the Support role. Not as much as the previous sample, but between Household (23 minutes more), Caring for Others (13 minutes), and Shopping (9 minutes), it adds up to about 45 minutes more than men. And it turns out that men spend 45 minutes more in Socializing, Relaxing, and Leisure activities than women. This is actually more than the previous sample! That’s right, even though both partners are working about the same amount of time, men maintained and actually increased their advantage in the Fun categories.
It’s true that the men in these relationships earn, on average, 17% more than the women. So perhaps they ‘deserve’ this extra fun time because of the additional money they bring in. Perhaps.
To test this, I’ll further refine the analysis. In addition to including only couples who work the same number of hours, I’ll only include those who earn similar salaries. “Similar” in this case means their yearly salaries are within 20% of each other. Within that 20% variance, sometimes the man makes more, sometimes the woman, sometimes they’re equal. It all evens out so that the average salaries for men and women are, in aggregate, nearly identical. Summarizing, this data set consists of partnerships where
- The man and women report working the same number of hours
- In aggregate, the ATUS survey confirms that the actual time spent working between men and women is identical (less than 1% different)
- In aggregate, the reported salaries of the men and women are identical (less than 1% different).
And what do we find in these ‘equitable’ partnerships?
| Same hours, similar salary | Women | Men | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Personal Care | 558.0 | 540.4 | 17.6 |
| Household Activities | 111.3 | 88.6 | 22.8 |
| Caring for and Helping Household Members | 54.1 | 37.6 | 16.5 |
| Caring for and Helping Non-Household Members | 8.7 | 7.9 | 0.8 |
| Work and Work-Related Activities | 351.7 | 349.0 | 2.7 |
| Education | 4.8 | 3.9 | 0.8 |
| Consumer Purchases | 38.4 | 30.8 | 7.6 |
| Professional and Personal Care Services | 5.9 | 3.8 | 2.1 |
| Household Services | 1.0 | 0.9 | 0.1 |
| Government Services and Civic Obligations | 0.2 | 0.4 | -0.1 |
| Eating and Drinking | 72.4 | 79.5 | -7.1 |
| Socializing, Relaxing, and Leisure | 192.0 | 247.8 | -55.8 |
| Sports, Exercise, and Recreation | 17.9 | 25.2 | -7.3 |
| Religious and Spiritual Activities | 6.8 | 7.1 | -0.4 |
| Volunteer Activities | 4.9 | 7.1 | -2.2 |
| Telephone Calls | 3.9 | 1.5 | 2.4 |
That’s right, women still do more of the support work. They spend 23 minutes more on Household activities, 17 minutes more Caring for Others, and 8 minutes more shopping. Men have a 52 minute advantage in the Fun categories. Remember, these are households where the couple both work the same amount and pull down similar salaries. So much for egalitarianism.
This data is from a 20 year period, from 2003 to 2023. Perhaps things have changed over that time – maybe things aren’t as bad for women now as they were 20 years ago? To check this, I compared the first 4 years of data (2003-2006) versus the most recent 4 years (2019-2023), and indeed, things have improved. The excess Support work that women do has dropped by about one third; so has the excess Fun time that men have. Specifically, in 2003-2006 women spent 60 minutes more on Support activities, and men had 60 extra Fun minutes. Recently (2019-2023) both of those numbers dropped down to 40 minutes. If this trend continues, who knows? In 35 or 40 years things may be equal.
