Subject: Re: Men vs Women - WORK

From: [email-masked] (Aaron Hoffmeyer)
Date: 18 Aug 93 03:35:17 GMT

In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (Eric J. Forbis) writes:
>Looking at only housework is putting a nicely sexist/feminist one-uppersonship 
>spin on this issue. To get at a fair perspective, try looking at the total 
>work done by both sexes:
>
>                 Inside         Outside                
>                 Home             Home             Total
>--------------------------------------------------------
>Men                8               48                56
>Women             35               26                61
>
>(From Table 7.3  _Patterns in Time Use in Time, Goods, and 
>Well-Being_, Martha Hill,  quoted in _The Myth of Male Power_, Warren Farrell.)

Actually, Eric, you screwed this up ....   Quoting directly from the
book and citing the specific references.....

In 1991, the _Journal of Economic Literature_ reported that while women
still do seventeen more hours of work *inside* the home per week, men
do twenty-two more hours of work *outside* the home per week, including
commuting time.(1)  What happens when we compare the hours of the
average woman to the hours of the average man *both* inside and outside
the home?  Hers amount to fifty-six hours.  His amount to sixty-one
hours.  By the same measure.  Why?  The average woman works twenty-six
hours per week outside the home, the average man forty-eight hours.(2)

[The table above should be like this:

                      Inside         Outside                
                      Home             Home             Total
     --------------------------------------------------------
     Men               13               48                61
     Women             30               26                56 ]

Studies of working wives that say that wives do two jobs while their
husbands do just one and slough off on the second tell but half the
truth.  They are so misleading as to be a form of lying:  they are
women-as-victim studies.  More importantly, they make women angry and
increase the divorce rate, which deepens the anger, which....

Women's anger was intensified by the sense that women were changing and
men were not.  It was assumed this was because of male complacency.  It
was not....

-------------------------
1.  F. Thomas Juster and Frank P. Stafford, "The Allocation of Time:
    Emperical Findings, Behavioral Models and Problems Measurement,"
    _Journal of Economic Literature_, vol 29, no. 2, June 1991, p.
    477.

2.  Ibid.

Source:  _The Myth of Male Power_, Warren Farrell, Ph.D.

The Martha Hill information was for overtime worked -- and did NOT
state what you stated above. 

According to this study, men work five more hours per week than women --
not exactly what we have been hearing around these parts.

--
Aaron L. Hoffmeyer
[email-masked]

---

From: [email-masked] (rini)
Date: Wed, 18 Aug 1993 04:34:06 GMT

[email-masked] (Eric J. Forbis) writes:

>------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Men          8                       48                56
>Women     35                    26                61

Wait a minute -- last time this stat was cited (earlier this week), men
came up as the "harder workers"... which is it?  I'm confused.

Well, I know that Farrell says it is the other way in TMofMP, so I
give him the benefit of the doubt... ?

Anyway, it's important to keep in mind that this stat suffers from 
basically the same "flaws" as the infamous "women only earn $.60 to 
every $1.00 dollar that men earn" stat.  When you look at the $.60
stat, people say "gee whiz, $.60 for the same work??"  Of course, 
that's not true.

Similarly, I think our first reaction when looking at the Farrell
stat (not quite the same as the one above) is to say, "Gee, women who 
work *and* do most of the housework still put in less hours than
men!"  Of course, that's not true either.

At the heart of the Farrell statistic is that housewives work 
fewer hours than employed men. And if you really want to careful 
on your comparisons, you might also want to consider that there are 
more women of retirement age than men, or, more broadly, that there 
are more single women than single men in general.  

The results are very different, of course, if you base your figures
on married couples where both partners are employed.  And I may 
be wrong about this, but I don't think that there has been much 
if any feminist outcry that *housewives* have to work "the second shift".

rini