University of Michigan News Service – UM News

U.S. husbands are doing more housework while wives are doing less

ANN ARBOR—American men are doing about 16 hours of housework a week, up from 12 hours a week in 1965, according to a study by the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research (ISR), the world’s largest academic survey and research organization.

The weekly housework hours of American women have declined sharply since 1965, the study finds. But women are still doing much more housework than men—about 27 hours a week.

The findings are part of a study of time-use trends in the United States and other industrialized nations, conducted by ISR researchers F. Thomas Juster, Hiromi Ono and Frank Stafford with funding from the ISR Alfred P. Sloan Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life.

For the study, the researchers analyzed data from time-diaries, considered the most accurate way to assess how people spend their time, supplementing the analysis with data from questionnaires asking men and women to recall how much time they spent on housework in an average week, including time spent cooking, cleaning and doing other work around the house.

While the number of hours men reported spending on such work increased steadily from 1965 to 1985, the increase stalled after that. “This lack of recent growth in housework hours among men may reflect the strong labor market during the 1990s,” says Stafford, an economist who directs the ISR Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the source of much U.S. time-use data.

HOURS A WEEK SPENT ON WORK in the U.S. Time diary data Men Women Housework Market Work Total Work Housework Market Work Total Work1965 12 43 55 40 18 581975 14 38 51 33 18 511985 16 34 49 31 20 51 Percentage change 1989-1999 Questionnaire recall data no change +10% +8% -13% +17% +2%

* Time diary data is not available after 1985, but questionnaire dataon time use are available through 1999. Analyzing the percentage changein time use from 1989 to 1999 using this questionnaire data provides anupdated picture of time-use trends. Assuming no dramatic changes in timeuse occurred between 1985 and 1989, the number of hours a week men spenton housework in 1999, for example, is estimated at approximately 16 hoursa week since there is no change from 1989 to 1999.

Source: University of Michigan Institute for Social Research (ISR)

“‘Vanishing housework’ seems to be a result of the good job market for women as well as men,” says Stafford. “But there’s some reason to believe these low levels of housework will persist even in today’s weaker job market, since our research shows that most people rate routine housework as the least enjoyable use of their time.”

Despite the popular perception that Americans are working longer than ever, the time diary data clearly show that total work hours—defined as labor market work plus housework—decreased substantially from 1965 to 1985 for both men and women. From 1989 to 1999, the questionnaire recall data indicate that paid work in the labor market increased by 10 percent for men and 17 percent for women, reflecting the decade’s strong job market and the increasing labor market participation of women. As a result, total work time for men increased by 8 percent over that decade. But given the drop in housework time for women, their total work time increased by only 2 percent. “These changes are not large enough to explain why people feel like they have so much less free time these days,” says Juster. “It could be that more leisure time today involves scheduled activities, which make people feel busy rather than relaxed.”

For their analysis, the researchers also examined trends in cross-national differences in time use, drawing on a wide variety of data collected since 1965 in Japan, Russia, Sweden, Canada, Finland and Hungary. Among their findings:

Total work time (defined as market labor plus housework) tends to be higher for men than for women in countries with relatively high levels of income, including Japan, the United States and Sweden. In contrast, women have substantially more total work time than men in Russia, Finland and Hungary.

Swedish men do substantially more housework (24 hours a week) than men in the other countries examined and Japanese men do much less housework (4 hours a week). “Cross-national comparisons of the gender gap in housework hours indicate that Americans are less gender egalitarian than the Swedes but more egalitarian than the Japanese,” says Ono, a sociologist and assistant ISR research scientist.

Hungarian women do the most housework while Russian women do the least.

Leisure time is greatest in Japan, Sweden and the United States and lowest in Hungary, for both men and women, with television viewing substantially higher in Japan than elsewhere, especially among women.

The data on U.S. housework time are from the ISR Panel Study of Income Dynamics, funded by the National Science Foundation, with additional funding for cross-national analyses from the United States-Japan Foundation.

The world’s largest academic survey and research organization, the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research (ISR) was established in 1948. A leader in the development and application of social science methodology, ISR conducts some of the most widely-cited studies in the nation. These include the Survey of Consumer Attitudes, National Election Studies, the Monitoring the Future Study, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the Health and Retirement Study, the Columbia County Longitudinal Study, and the National Survey of Black Americans. ISR researchers also collaborate with social scientists in more than 60 nations on the World Values Surveys and other projects, and the Institute has formal ties with universities in Poland, China, and South Africa.