WUNRN
By Simran Khosla - April 14, 2014
OECD -
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
When looking
at this data, it’s important to remember that gender equality isn’t just about
women working more paid hours or doing less housework. It’s also about men
cutting back their work hours to pitch in more around the house. Countries that
have lighter workweeks, in fact, tend to have a more equal distribution between
men and women in the home.
The OECD
compiled data from national surveys of men and women ages 15 - 64, both single
and married. Hours spent on childcare were included as unpaid work for the few
countries that had comprehensive statistics.
In
Scandinavian countries like Norway and Sweden, government regulations keep work
hours to a comfortable 37.5 per week (40- to 50-hour weeks prevail in other European
countries). This gives Scandinavian men much more time for other activities,
including helping around the house.According
to the OECD, since long work hours are legally limited,
Scandinavian culture allows both mothers and fathers to have time to work and
raise a family, without having to rely on traditional gender roles to manage
the workload.
This also
helps explain why countries like Mexico
and Japan
make the least-equal list. Japanese men spend as much time on paid work as
Japanese women spend on both housework and paid work. It’s unsurprising that
men in Japan and Mexico wouldn’t chip in more than an hour or so at home,
considering their paid workload.
But in Italy
— unlike in Mexico, Portugal or Japan — the division of labor isn’t a question
of men not having the time to do housework. With an average of 3.2 hours of
paid work every day, Italian men are some of the least overworked in the OECD.
In fact,
across the OECD, it’s the women who are generally more overworked than men.
When you look at total paid work combined with total unpaid work, women spend
an average of 2.6 hours more than men every day on work — at the office, in the
community, and at home. The OECD notes that “in virtually every country, men
are able to fit in valuable extra minutes of leisure each day while women spend
more time doing unpaid housework.”
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