It’s certainly no secret that when it comes to the division of household and parenting labor, women consistently say they do more than men. But it’s not just perception — the data shows this too.
The latest figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) put an even finer point on this discrepancy and showed just how imbalanced these dynamics are for the majority of American households.
Men have far more leisure time than women, according to the latest American Time Use Survey
The American Time Use Survey is a yearly study performed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics that tracks everything from the number of hours Americans are working at their paid jobs to the number of people who work from home.
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It gets even more granular than that, as well, delving into the details of Americans’ lives — how much time they’re spending caring for elderly family members, for example, or how many stay-at-home moms are also single moms.
But it’s not just about work — it also tracks Americans’ leisure time and activities. The most recent data on this subject has proven particularly revealing when it comes to the division of household labor between men and women.
Despite working longer hours at their paid jobs, married men have more than 5 hours of leisure time than women.
Mom, activist, and educator Laura Danger recently dug into this data on TikTok, and her helpful visualizations of the Bureau of Labor Statistics analysis show just how stark these differences are.
The graphs she created show that when it comes to pretty much anything to do with running a household, women are doing far more work than men.
As Danger explained in her video, the categories of time use with the biggest discrepancies between men and women are “household activities, purchasing of goods and services, and caregiving.”
The BLS’ data found that 86% of women did “housework, cooking, lawn care, or household management” each day compared to 71% of men. Women also spent, on average, .6 hours more doing these tasks than men.
Men, on the other hand, spend more time on average at their paid jobs and vocations. But they also spend substantially more time doing leisure activities — an average of 5.6 hours per day versus 4.8 for women, or nearly six hours per week.
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And, as Danger pointed out, these discrepancies widen among married people — married women do an average of 50 more minutes per day of housework than single women do, for example.
This data is in line with many other studies that show even egalitarian marriages share these imbalances.
As Danger put it in her video, these discrepancies are “interesting but not unexpected.” Studies of the matter have shown these trends for quite some time, and what underlines them even more boldly is that even in the most modern marriages, the trends continue to exist.
A 2023 Pew Research study, for example, found that even in dual-income marriages where men and women earn the same and have a more egalitarian approach to managing a household and parenting, the division of labor is totally unbalanced.
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Pew found that, on average, women in these marriages do about a third more childcare and more than double the housework than men. Other studies have found the imbalance to be even more acute.
A more recent Pew study on leisure time specifically makes these differences even more stark. Like the BLS, they found a general gap in leisure time between men and women. But when people have kids, that gap nearly doubles, from an average of 1.6 hours a week to 2.9.
It’s no wonder, then, that many women today are feeling like marriage and child-rearing might not be worth it. As one commenter on Danger’s video put it, the takeaway for many is that “single life is the best life.” That’s not true for everyone, of course, but you can hardly blame women for feeling this way.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.
