lumigan tramadol tadalafil

Do Women Really Work More?

2009-09-21
By

We often hear the claim that women do two jobs, one in the marketplace and one in the home, while men do only one. The conclusion is that women work more than men and men need to start doing a lot more housework. However, as with many feminist claims regarding gender equality, actual research does not back up this assertion.

An international study by three economists (Michael Burda of Humboldt University in Berlin, Daniel Hamermesh of the University of Texas, and Philippe Weil of the Free University of Brussels), demonstrate that in the Western world, men and women work the same number of hours every day.

An article in Slate summarizes the findings in this way:

Throughout the world, men spend more time on market work, while women spend more time on homework. In the United States and other rich countries, men average 5.2 hours of market work a day and 2.7 hours of homework each day, while women average 3.4 hours of market work and 4.5 hours of homework per day. Adding these up, men work an average of 7.9 hours per day, while women work an average of—drum roll, please—7.9 hours per day.

Personally this comes as no great suprise to me, since the national statistics in Sweden (no translation available) consistently show that men and women work the same number of hours every week.

The authors of the study have also investigated the widespread myth that women work much more than men:

In a survey by the authors of this study, 54 percent of economists and 62 percent of economics students thought that women work more than men, as did more than 70 percent of sociologists. And while the gender equal-work phenomenon has been noted before, “it has been swamped by claims in widely circulated sociological studies … that women’s total work significantly exceeds men’s,” as the authors put it.

My interpretation is that feminism has been so successful at getting its message across (women work more), that no one has really bothered to check the facts, not even the professionals and academics who need to have accurate data in order to perform their job properly.

Unfortunately, the list of feminist myths that many people regard as facts, is growing long:

  1. Women work more than men
  2. Intimate partner violence means men beating up women
  3. Women earn less than men when performing exactly the same job
  4. Women don’t lie about being raped
  5. Girls are shortchanged in schools
  6. The main reason for women not reaching the top of society is the “glass ceiling”
  7. And the biggest one of them all: the female gender role is much worse than the male gender role

Pelle Billing is an M.D. who writes and lectures about men’s issues and gender liberation beyond feminism.

2,050 views
Didn't make Oprah's Book Club. And Ronnie doesn't care. Man up. Buy the book now on Amazon.com. Or listen to Ronnie tell a story at escaping-from-reality.com.


  • Cassie

    @Samhaine

    How can you say that women asked for this “new role”?
    Maybe a percentage of women did, but how can you think it is realistic for men to be the only bread winner in 100% of American families?
    You should probably step outside of your bubble and notice that most women work for a supplemental income that helps support the money their husbands can’t make.

  • Samhaine

    Sorry Mindy, I meant to refute a few of your arguments and submitted the comment a bit too early.

    - As to your husband’s and your arrangement. That’s excellent and I’m glad it works for you. That is not the arrangement that should be forced on everyone simply because it works for you, however.

    - As to ‘equal work’ that is NEVER going to happen. It’s an irrational expectation. A man who works as a chemical engineer doesn’t work the same as a guy who works on a fishing boat, or a girl who works in a restaurant. Everyone getting ‘equal workloads’ is simply not going to happen, nor is everyone getting paid the same for said theoretical ‘equal workloads’ ever going to happen. It was attempted before, in Russia. As you see now there is no USSR anymore. Do you want the same thing to happen to America with this socio-communist belief?

    - As to the ‘wage gap’ arguments….There have been multiple studies done including the one in this very article that find substantially the same relative findings. Women make less money than men overall. But the REASON they make less money, is because they choose more often to work jobs with flex-time, little or no overtime, less risky jobs, or part time. You can’t look at just the pay and say ‘That’s not equal to mine therefore I deserve more.’ That’s not how the real world works. The only place where women get paid 78 cents to the dollar in true reality…is actually on Obama’s staff. Same job, same hours, less pay. That is far from true everywhere else, however. Certainly not in McCain’s office where women were earning more than men on the same staff positions.

    If you wish to come here to down on men, please come with more than anecdotal evidence and be prepared to present arguments with at least some measure of logic (even if flawed.) That is how real progress is made, logicial discourse and disagreement that eventually ends up in a reasonable compromise.

  • Samhaine

    @Mindy

    You might also recall that by and large men did not ask for this arrangement. WOMEN did, and the repercussions of many of the types of fallout have impacted on women, men and children in ways many of us couldn’t foresee. Some people adapt faster than others, some are willing to change and some are not.

    Women wanted to break from the ‘traditional mold’ if you wish to call it that, and many men were not in agreeance with that. Women wanted to bumrush the workforce in massive numbers and upset the dynamic as it existed then, which of course caused wages to plummet due to simple concepts such as Supply and Demand. Women didn’t used to have to work in large numbers to have an economy that not only functioned but was generally pretty strong. Now you do, because you (and your sisters) forced that change.

    So please, spare me the crying river about how hard women have it. I am not downing hard working women, I have known several of them. But that doesn’t change the truth: You asked for it, and you got it. Now shut up and ‘man up’ like we have done for generations. Welcome to the real world. It’s not all peaches n’ cream, dear, sorry.

    Until or unless women start dying in relatively equal numbers in workplace deaths, working as much overtime, dying in wars, and such I am really not interested in entertaining more victimhood mentality.

  • http://avoiceformen.com/ Paul Elam

    @ MindyC

    I’ll try to satisfy your curiosity. But it will first require you to abandon the idea of applying the personal anecdotes of your life to the world at large.

    It’s like saying smoking doesn’t cause cancer because your Aunt Mable smoked for forty years and never had a cough. In other words, it means nothing, and proves even less if that is possible.

    As you can see, Dr. Billing relied on research that gives us a more applicable and accurate picture of society than we can get within the short range of personal experience.

    The fact is that men work more than women, they work harder than women and they work more dangerous jobs than women on the whole. This also demonstrates the real reasons they make more than women.

    Sometimes the truth is uncomfortable. It doesn’t make it any less true.

    Check it out:

    http://www.avoiceformen.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=61:wages&catid=13:vfmoriginals&Itemid=27

  • MindyC

    I’ll remind myself of that next time my sister stumbles home after working an open to close shift and does the dishes her husband ignores in the sink, because he’s busy watching the game.

    Or when my sister uses her lunch breaks to come home and breast-feed her daughter. Or when she wakes up earlier than her husband in the morning to do a load of laundry so the kids will have clean clothes. And then packs their lunch.

    Or how about my mother who works three jobs doing in-home daycare with no breaks, accounting for my father’s business and accounting for another business. Then comes home and cleans the house.

    While my dad, who has worked from 9am-3pm with a lunchbreak in between, comes home three hours before she does and naps on the couch.

    However – my husband and I have determined to split the work equally. We divide all household tasks and we both either work full-time and go to school part-time, or work part-time and go to school full-time. In our case, the work is equally divided and neither of us feel resentful or angry.

    It’s possible for men and women to share equal work…but both partners have to step up to the plate. And I don’t see that happening for everyone. So, until everyone can obtain equal workloads – no one can make a false claim that men and women both work an equal amount of hours.

    And how do you argue the “women make lower wages than men myth?” So not only do my mother and sister work harder, but they do so for less wages. But please – tell me how this is inherently unfair to men. I’m quite curious.

  • Jay Black

    OOPs. Thought you were the other Paul. My apologies to both. My ideas still stand.

  • Jay Black

    If life is something like poker, knowing the math isn’t what wins the game, but any player worth his salt still knows the math backwards and forwards. They are the foundation of the game, on which the game is played.

    Paul-

    I agree with being cynical about statistics, especially after the way in which they have been abused and used against us, however, at the end of the day, statistics is a form of science, and an area at which we in the MRA movement should dominate. Your strength is very much in how you use your words, and smart men play to their strengths, but words are just as slippery as numbers. I feel that a welcome addition to your editorial team might be found in a mathmatician, specifically a statistician. Someone who not only verifies and disputes all the numbers thrown about in the gender war, but someone who can frame them in context of their very slippery nature. If we are going to win, these “numbers” must be dealt with, because they will continue to be used against us.

  • Jay R

    Has there been any other social movement besides feminism based entirely on lies and MS-information?

    Paranoia + Lies = Feminism

    And there are so many “proud” feminists.

  • Paul

    Reading Pelle’s article reminded me of my own thinking is on subjects like this – and that I believe nothing I am told unless I have personal experience of the truth or otherwise of the matter. This might seem quite a difficult position to maintain. But just bare with me for a moment.

    Most of what we understand about the world comes from what we are told. This comes often in the form of some statistic or another. What we are told often excites the passions to the point of frenzy. Yet we our selves have no way of knowing if what we are told has any validity.

    Believe me war have been fought on little more that what people have been told.

    So I am cynical. This is so. But I at least want to approximate to consistency; so I treat everything I am told with suspicion. I also have a disposition which makes me question if things can in fact be know with certainty. In the realm of the physical sciences there may be more reason to believe since hopefully there is consistence and more importantly repeatability. This surely does not apply when the subject matter is behaviour or attitude.

    I will just end with an anecdote which if you think about it both proves and disproves my thesis about believing nothing.

    I used to work in the Nuclear Industry and if I remember rightly the scientific evidence was that alpha rays could not penetrate through the outer layers of (dead) skin. It eventually transpired that the original tests where done on skin taken from corpses which consequently had a thicker outer layer and indeed the outer layer could not be precisely defined. So a simple thing like this which you might put in the realm of scientific fact proved to be ambiguous. How much more doubtful might be all the other things we are told.

  • Jay Black

    Agreed. Destroying feminism begins with punching holes in it, which is most easliy done by exposing these myths and distortions. We should have a cited, peer reviewed article that breaks down these bogus myths with the actual facts and statistics. Something short and concise that every MRA can carry around in his pocket. Something that has multiple citations as evidence and also counters the primary opposing evidence by showing who and why that bias research was conducted. I think the trick will be in keeping it short and concise, sense I’m sure their is tons of bogus feminist research to debunk. Hit the main talking points.

  • Amfortas

    Women’s work is four times as important as men’s work. They do it all far better than any man who did women’s work would do it, if men bothered to do any work at all. But everyone knows that all men do is sit around at home, occasionally lifting their feet when the woman staggers by thrice daily pushing the great weighty hoover, and when men do off each day to ‘work’ all they do is gather together to gawk at young women bending over to pick up things that the men have deliberately knocked off their desks, and occasionally go in packs for a pee where they can admire, with astonishment, each other’s penises.

    Fortunately most women, with the exception of those who are completely dominated by the patriarchy and chained to kitchen sinks, (1:4 still, after all this time) can do many, many things all at once. Without this innate multi-skilling ability, put to the service of an ungrateful society, desk ornaments would litter floors and the world would grind to a halt. Nevertheless, even such Superwomen can benefit from vitamin supplements for extra energy and tampax for confidence. The latter is especially good for winning tennis matches and walking modest distances along beaches. ‘Though where they get the time……

  • Mr.K

    Wikipedia: Urban Legend: :iLink
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_legend

  • Mr.K

    @steven deluca.
    I like your idea. After my angioplasty I was taking cardiac rehab and a man who looked wery distinquished asked “Where does the rule of thumb” come from?” Then he gave the usual spiel about wife beating. There’s Urban Mythology on Google, but it’s not as specific as your suggest. Better writers than I could thnk about it.

  • steven deluca

    We need a location for students, boys and girls, titled Five Feminist Fables, or Feminist Phallacies, where the worst lies about men are refuted. I know that ten myths about gender helps some find a resource by a women’s group, but it would be nice if MND had a spot students could click on where they could type in any story told by feminist teachers. Super Bowl Sunday, 1 in 4 WOMEN ARE RAPED, (My son, age 23 just ran into that one on the San Franisco State campus. The top Berkely grad, female, for her gradu speech told the students there that 1 in 3 women had been raped or sexually abuse… smart girls but not that smart.) Understanding Male Bashing 101 or some such name would not be as good as Sexist Myths about Men and I am sure others can come up with a better title. I am sure someone could do a good job setting this up and then ask experts, infoRADAR for example on DV, Warren Farrell for “Why Men Earn More” Glenn Sacks on fathers. If I were as well educated and capable as some of the writers on MND I would volunteer to organize and set something up but between sleight (he insisted) brain damage and lots of PTSD from military duty … I can’t do it.

  • Mr.K

    Here is a female columnist opinion from this side of Atlantic (USA). About Africa she may have a point. But as the movie “Blood Diamonds” so powerfully potrayed, men are mangled also so Western women could look dazzling. Link:
    http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.reimer21sep21,0,3415031.column







Right.

Man up.

Buy the book now on Amazon.com. Or listen to Ronnie tell a story at escaping-from-reality.com.

Search

RSS Amy Alkon

RSS Donna Laframboise