Moreover, it also depends on what kind of work we're talking. If you just talk normal "chores" you leave out a whole bunch of stuff that people don't consider such as "caring work" and "emotional work" (see Arlie Hochschild's work). Women do a lot of 'caring work' such as counseling children, providing a shoulder to cry on to relatives who call late at night when their marriage is in trouble or they're having problems at work. They also do things that these time studies and people themselves don't think about such as shoppingg for wedding presents, etc. Moreover 2, women are often saddled with the day in and day out work which can't be put off (laundry and dinner dishes and cooking), while men do things like mow, trim hedges, auto repair, etc. Thus, while the time spent may be the same, the experience of that work and its demands is much different. For those who do that daily chores which can't be put off, it's a feeling of drudgery and less freedom to determine when and where you do it.
Finally, as they point out, they didn't seem to account for the women who work part-time. Also, I can't tell, but did they examine those who have children? It's there that people find the biggest disparities, which may be a big problem with the data. If they're not looking at whether men and women are evenly splitting up the work that goes along with having young children in the house, then the study's skewed b/c that's where Hochschild and others have found the biggest disparities in gendered divisions of labor.
Oh, finally2, they also don't account for the different types of market work women do. If nearly 3/4 of all women are segregated into nursing, clerical, and teaching work, then they are doing significantly more "emotion" work on the job. That kind of work can be stressful since it requires you to manage your entire presentation of self throughout the day. CF Hochchild's early classic, _The Managed Heart_ which was a study of airline attendants. Others have since followed up on her work, asking how people who do service work and pink collar work are asked each day to craft their selves for presentation to the public and how they manage the need to stuff back their feelings in order to take on a canned demeanor for 8 hours a day. One good example is Robin Leidner's 'Fast Food, Fast Talk' which talks about the routinization of service work and the routinization of the self, feelings, and emotions.
At 12:33 PM 4/19/2007, Doug Henwood wrote:
>[original NBER WP at <http://www.nber.org/papers/w13000>]
>
><http://www.slate.com/id/2164268/>
"You know how it is, come for the animal porn, stay for the cultural analysis." -- Michael Berube
Bitch | Lab http://blog.pulpculture.org (NSFW)