I have had a few examples of the effect of feminism in two assignments I received from students at the end of the semester. One of my students, a 40ish divorced single mom recently turned in a case study assignment. I had given her the basic case of a fifty-something year old male executive recovering from a heart attack and she embellished the case. I am fine with students embellishing the cases because it makes the assignments more interesting for me to read, however this student added some feminist flavored elements to the case. The man was cheating on his wife with a mistress which caused him stress and led to his heart attack. The man didn’t listen to his wife when she told him to eat better and exercise which led to his heart attack. Once the man ended his affair and started listening to his wife all was well in his world. This is from a student who also “accidentally” included one of the male faculty in my department on a email containing “stupid man tricks”. That male faculty member mentioned the email in a faculty meeting and my chair shrugged it off. Compare this behavior with my chair's reaction when I said something that offended a female student.
Another non-traditional (late 20s and married) female student did a journal article review on a study that examined the time use of women in relation to their health. Her assignment included the following paragraph (in italics):
The article stated that a woman’s typical occupational roles usually include work, child care, and home management. A man’s typically includes work and leisure pursuits. This hardly seems appropriate to me. It may not be received well by all, but I think it would be beneficial to initiate a type of “couples training.” The husband or significant other should be informed of the occupational tasks of his spouse/significant other. Then he should be educated on how this is affecting her health and well-being. The woman should also be educated on stress and time management techniques. I think many women (myself included) should be reminded that it’s Ok and usually necessary to ask for help. I think it would be beneficial for the couple to discuss alternatives so as to alleviate the stress on the woman. Tasks should be shared between both in a partnership. In addition, the women in this study must find a way to incorporate leisure pursuits into their life.
The article did indeed say that a woman’s typical occupational roles usually include work, child care, and home management and a man’s typically include work and leisure pursuits. :
“Women’s time use is different than men’s. Women, especially mothers, spend more time in household work, child care, and helping other family members, whereas men spend more time in paid work and in leisure occupations (Bird & Fremont, 1991; Statistics Sweden, 2003). This gender difference is reflected in the patterns of daily occupations. Because a higher proportion of woman’s occupations attend to others’ needs, they are more frequently interrupted from what they are doing (Hirdman, 1999). The impact of these ingredients of woman’s daily occupations on their well-being was shown in a study of working, cohabitant mothers (Erlandsson & Eklund, 2003a). A lack of control and frequent experiences of hassles in daily occupations were found to be risk factors for experiencing lower quality of life and lower self-rated health.”
(Erlandsson & Eklund, 2006, p.28)
It makes it sound like men just go to work and then pursue leisure interests and women work themselves into lower quality of life and self-rated health what with all the house work etc. they do, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, my student was taken in by a case of the authors twisting references to back up their position, and then she rolled with it. Let’s take a look at the references:
The Bird and Fremont reference was a time use study that examined how men and women in the United States spent their time in 1981. According to this study, out of a seven day week, women spend 18.41 hours in paid work, 16.91 hours in housework, and 4.33 hours in childcare for a total of 39.65 hours of work. Men spend 35.47 hours in paid work, 4.36 hours in housework, and 1.74 hours in childcare for a total of 41.57 hours of work. So, men actually spent more time working, 1.92 hours more per week. One would also assume that the work of many men also serves others and may include frequent interruptions of tasks as well.
Okay, maybe men have a lot more time spent in leisure. According to Bird and Fremont, women spend 27.09 hours in leisure and men spend 28.25 hours in leisure per week for a difference of 1.14 hours. So, men get 1.14 hours more leisure a week. Um, okay, so men spend more time working and doing leisure activities than women. What are the women doing during that time? According to Bird and Fremont, they are spending more time than men in two activities on average: sleeping and self care (grooming etc).
What about the Statistics Sweden reference? Well I couldn’t retrieve that exact reference but I found the same data in another source that also included time use by gender for other European countries too. Time use statistics from the Swedish government regarding Swedish women and men aged 20 to 74, revealed the following patterns expressed in hours and minutes per 24 hour day.
Free Time: men- 5:24/ women- 5:03
Meals, personal care: men- 2:11/ women- 2:28
Sleep: men- 8:01/ women- 8:11
Travel: men- 1:30/ women- 1:23
Domestic Work: men- 2:29/ women- 3:42
Gainful Work: men- 4:25/ women- 3:12
Again, men spend 8:25 in work tasks (travel, domestic work, gainful work) and women spend 8:07. Men spend 15:36 in self care/leisure tasks (free time, eating meals, personal care, sleep) and women 15:42.
Neither reference makes the case that women are spending more time working than men, or than men have significantly more leisure time than women because of all the work women do around the house. In fact these references make the case that the work load seems to be pretty evenly distributed between men and women in a home. Of course that doesn’t fit the feminist mantra that “a woman’s work is never done”. It is pretty easy to imagine that women reading that peer reviewed journal article would get the same misconception my student did, that women have lower perceived health because men don’t help with domestic tasks. And don’t even get me started on the idea that a correlation or association between two factors (say time use and perceived health) means that one factor causes or even has direct influence on the other factor…
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2 comments:
Here's another reference to add to your bin of ammo against the argument that women work harder than men.
The truth is, as you've demonstrated, when the total household effort is taken into account, the time spent in support of the home by the male and the female are fairly equal.
Of course, Heretic would contend that "women's work" doesn't even compare to men's work. But I'll let him make his argument and let you and your readers be the judges.
Also, I'm a tad uncomfortable with the concept of "lower perceived health" as a reliable indicator of lower actual health. For if women's longevity is any barometer, the opposite appears true.
I'd love to see your feminist students tear into health spending inequality and what that suggests about the priority our society places on male lives versus female ones.
EW,
Thanks for the additional info. I skimmed that post when it was reposted on MarkyMark's blog. In fact, it reminded me about finishing this post :)
Unlike Heretic, I don't recall my "house wife" mom ever complaining to my steel worker dad that she had more to do than he did. I'm pretty certain my mom never read Betty Friedan, so I think she was pretty content with her life. It seems to me that there are lazy women and lazy men, and women who work hard and men who work hard. From my observation it has more to do with the individual's work ethic than their gender. The feminist mantra about women doing more work seems to encourage women's complaints, which I suppose is the purpose.
Regarding perceived health, this is a common outcome measure (the SF- 36) used in many studies that examine over-all health rather than any specific diagnosis. It is cheaper to use in research than medical tests or physician assessments. I agree with you that subjective ratings can be very problematic. However, the SF-36 is highly correlated with more objective measures such as physician assessments. And, believe it or not, is actually more predictive of mortality than physician assessments are.
I have often read that women have higher morbidity than men even though they have longer life spans, but I have never dug into the stats to see if it was true or not.
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