[lbo-talk] gender & work time

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 4/20/07, bitch at pulpculture.org <bitch at pulpculture.org> wrote:
> >This is based on time-diaries, not self-reports:
> >
> ><http://www.nber.org/papers/w13000>
>
> correct me if i'm wrong, but a time diary is kept by the respondent, not by
> another person. if so, it's a self-report. it is considered better than
> questions asked about someone's estimate of how much time they spent, since
> they're supposed to fill it out as they do the work. Depends on the
> methodology and I didn't pay for the paper, so I don't know the intervals.
> The problem with it is that it's sometimes kept for only a day or two,
> which doesn't necessarily give anyone an accurate look. others are asked to
> keep the diary at short intervals 2 or more times a month for a better
> sense of how people spend their time. moreover, the data isn't as
> generalizable as survey methods but again I didn't get a peek at the paper
> to see their checks on their methods.

One of the authors makes the paper available for free at his Web page:
Michael Burda, Daniel S. Hamermesh, and Philippe Weil, "Total Work,
Gender and Social Norms," NBER Working Paper 13000, 2007,
<http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Hamermesh/IsoWorkToGo307.pdf>.
There is a major problem in the authors' assumptions.  On page 2, they
declare:

     We count as household production those activities

     that satisfy the third-party rule (Reid, 1934) that

     substituting market goods and services for one's own

     time is possible. Such activities may be enjoyable

     (as may be work in the market), even at the margin;

     but they still have _the common characteristic that we

     could pay somebody to perform them for us and we

     are not paid for performing them_. We define total

     work as the sum of time spent in market work and

     household production.  (emphasis added)

That's an assumption that is bound to underestimate women's work
hours, for a lot of work that goes into "household production,"
especially of the sort that is more often done by women than men, is
the kind of work for which there is no market substitute (e.g., taking
children to doctors' offices).  Based on this anti-feminist
assumption, they "discover" this "fact": "Men enjoy more leisure,
women spend more time in tertiary activities" (p. 5).  What are
"tertiary activities"?  "[T]hose things that we cannot pay other
people to do for us but that we must do at least some of" (p. 3),
precisely the sort of activities that make home what it is that women
tend to perform because men don't perform them and there are no market
substitutes for them.  :-0

This is a dumb paper.
-- 
Yoshie