The Family and Free Time - Running The Household

Our leisure time is not just dictated by our time away from the office. We spend significant time each week simply maintaining our homes: cooking dinners, raking leaves, and paying bills. Women have traditionally run the household, with men bringing home the paycheck. Is this still the case?

The panel shows the average weekly hours spent by married and employed women and men in total family care. (As might be expected the hours were higher for the unemployed — they have more time to do chores.) The figures, taken from U.S. Department of Labor and Time for Life: Surprising Ways Americans Use Their Time, show how the work gets divided. Women still handle more of the responsibilities than men and are generally spending less time at them. Women spent 40.2 hours a week doing housework, shopping and caring for children in 1965 and 30.9 in 1985, a decline of 23% in two decades. Females who work spent nearly the same amount of time at their chores, with 26.1 hours a week in 1965 and 25.6 in 1985, a decrease of only 2%.

Men are helping more around the house: their time spent on chores increased 36.5% from 11.5 hours to 15.7 hours. What accounts for the increase? With men remaining single longer, perhaps some men are more willing to perform household chores themselves. In spite of all the discussion of gender roles, however, the traditional roles in marriage still seem intact: the task of maintaining a household still falls to women.

What's going on here? Women worked roughly 40 hours a week running the household and raising children in 1965 — the time spent at a typical job. Together, men and women spent 51.7 hours running the home. By 1985, women were spending 30.9 hours performing the same tasks. Together, men and women spent 45.4 hours running the home. Are we simply more efficient? Or are we spending less time because we have so little to spare?

A point worth making: we are spending less time on housework as our houses have been getting bigger. According to government statistics, the average square footage of a new privately owned home grew 48.3% from 1,500 square feet in 1970 to 2,255 in 1999. Those homes with 2.5 bathrooms or more increased 244% for the same period; homes with 4 or more bedrooms increased 41.6%.

Source: Chao, Elaine L. U.S. Department of Labor. Report on the American Workforce, 2001, p. 123.