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I could not help but think of 400 Words when I came across this article on work from the New York Times. David Leonhardt reports on research claiming that women are now slightly less happy, on average, than men are—partly because, conclude the papers’ authors, women are now spending more time doing paid work.
From the article:
there appears to be a growing happiness gap between men and women.
Two new research papers, using very different methods, have both come to this conclusion. Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, economists at the University of Pennsylvania (and a couple), have looked at the traditional happiness data, in which people are simply asked how satisfied they are with their overall lives. In the early 1970s, women reported being slightly happier than men. Today, the two have switched places.
Mr. Krueger, analyzing time-use studies over the last four decades, has found an even starker pattern. Since the 1960s, men have gradually cut back on activities they find unpleasant. They now work less and relax more.
Over the same span, women have replaced housework with paid work — and, as a result, are spending almost as much time doing things they don’t enjoy as in the past. Forty years ago, a typical woman spent about 23 hours a week in an activity considered unpleasant, or 40 more minutes than a typical man. Today, with men working less, the gap is 90 minutes.
These trends are reminiscent of the idea of “the second shift,” the name of a 1989 book by the sociologist Arlie Hochschild, arguing that modern women effectively had to hold down two jobs. The first shift was at the office, and the second at home.
But researchers who have looked at time-use data say the second-shift theory misses an important detail. Women are not actually working more than they were 30 or 40 years ago. They are instead doing different kinds of work. They’re spending more time on paid work and less on cleaning and cooking.
This comes to me as I’m in a pensive mood—I have been spending some evenings recently catching up on the big backlog of “work” submissions, and re-reading older ones, thinking about how best to put the next 400 Words book together. I found myself wondering whether there were common themes among the essays, and whether they’re saying anything, overall, about the experience of work. A few thoughts off the top of my head:
About half the pieces are about a single job, and half about a string of jobs or a whole life’s worth of jobs. The attitude of the pieces towards the work described definitely varies: the tone of the writings ranges from bitter and indignant to fulfilled and proud. Some are more detached and musing, as if to point out the absurdity of work. There have probably been more ‘negative’ than ‘positive’ sentiments about work, overall.
Reading the work pieces and then coming across this article in the Times makes me wonder: is paid work less satisfying than “cleaning and cooking” And if so, why would that be? What do you think? I’d love to hear from some men and some ladies on this one. Comment away.
Hat tip to Jonah for the NYT story.
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