Feminists who claim that men should do a larger share of the housework and childcare are ignoring the fact that on 
average, men and women already do the same number of hours of productive work, according to new research [1].
The research, which appears in a special edition of ‘Renewal: a journal of social democracy’, finds that, when the hours spent doing both paid work, unpaid household, care and voluntary work together are added together, men already do more than their fair share.
The article is written by Catherine Hakim, a lecturer in sociology at the London School of Economics
Until now, Hakim says, unpaid work such as childcare and domestic work has been hard to quantify and so mostly ignored by social scientists and policy makers.
However, the development of Time Use Surveys across the European Union has yielded data on exactly how much time we spend carrying out both paid and unpaid productive activities.
According to this data, women and men across Europe, on average, do the same total number of productive work hours once paid jobs and unpaid household duties are added together – roughly eight hours a day.
Hakim says: ‘We now have a much more specific and accurate portrait of how families and individuals divide their “work” and this data overturns the well-entrenched theory that women work disproportional long hours in jobs and at home in juggling family and work. Feminists constantly complain that men are not doing their fair share of domestic work. The reality is that most men already do more than their fair share.’
The figures show that, although men carry out substantially more hours of paid work, women will often choose to scale down their hours of paid employment to make time for household work when starting a family.
This is backed up by Census data here showing that, while many married women are in paid work, a large percentage of these are in part-time work.
CSO figures show that married women with children are much less likely to work full-time than men. For example, a third of married women in their 40s don’t work at all. Most of these will have children under 12. Another 127,000 women work fewer than 20 hours per week compared with only 32,000 men.
In Britain, many men are shown to actually work longer hours on average than women, as many will work overtime to boost family income when the children are at home while wives switch to part-time jobs or drop out of employment altogether.
Couples with no children at home and with both in full-time jobs emerge as the only group where women work more hours in total than men, once paid and unpaid work hours are added up.
The article argues that in societies where genuine choices are open to women, the key driver to how work is divided comes down to lifestyle preference, not gender.
Individuals fall into three categories: work-centred, home-centred or those wanting to combine work and family (adaptive). 80 per cent of women fall into the adaptive category, Catherine Hakim finds, with only 20 per cent wanting a work-centred lifestyle.
Despite this, however, most European policies are geared towards full-time worker carers and ignore unpaid work, although there are several countries that are starting to support family work.
Finland, for example, operates a homecare allowance system that is paid to any parent who stays at home without using State nurseries, effectively paying the carer for their work.
In Germany, the income-splitting tax system for couples recognises the work done by full-time homemakers by aggregating and then splitting the spouses earnings between into two halves, reflecting the idea that both benefit from the home/work arrangement.
‘Instead of looking for the one ‘best option’ policy, governments should offer several’, says Catherine Hakim. ‘One-sided policies that support employment and careers but ignore the productive work done in the family are, in effect, endorsing market place values over family values. But the altruistic and community values embraced by home-centred or adaptive individuals, such as sharing, trust and cohesion, are equally as important to a social democracy.
‘Furthermore, there is evidence that men are beginning to demand the same options and choices as women, with more claims of sex discrimination from men. Policy makers need to be aiming for gender-neutral policies that cater for all three main lifestyle choices.’