We can’t let the day pass without noting an intriguing article on Slate. According to a new study, men put in more time on the job than women (this runs counter to complaints often lodged by feminists):
“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. This is the first major finding of the new study.
“Whatever you may have heard on The View, when [the economists who produced this study] accounted for market work and homework, men and women spent about the same amount of time each day working. The averages sound low because they include weekends and are based on a sample of adults that included stay-at-home parents as well as working ones, and other adults.”
Golly, I don’t know what to make of these findings. One item struck me as particularly interesting (and true, based on the number of women you see carrying heavy burdens on the roads in Third World countries):
“While men and women spend about the same time working in rich countries, women do work more than men in poor countries. And the gap widens as countries get poorer. While in the United States, which has a per capita GNP of roughly $33,000, there is no difference between the amount of male and female work, in Benin, Madagascar, and South Africa, which have a per capita income of less than $10,000, women work one to two hours more per day than men.”