The Rush Hour: The Quality of Leisure Time and Gender Equity (original) (raw)
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Unequal leisure opportunities across genders – overwhelmed women
International Journal of the Sociology of Leisure, 2018
Leisure is the means of reproducing our energies we lose due to objective and subjective weariness. While the 'cure' for objective fatigue is sleeping and resting, the solution for subjective tiredness is leisure and pleasure. We need both to stay healthy. Opportunities to stay healthy are however not equal in our societies: Place of Residence; Race/Ethnicity; Occupation; Gender; Religion; Education; Socioeconomic status; and Social capital/Resources (all together referred to as PROGRESS) are the key determinants. In the present paper we highlight at the gender issue from among the key determinants, which status is in strong connection with almost all the above listed features. Throughout history women's political power, financial status (feminisation of poverty, wage gaps), education and labour market status (vertical and horizontal segregation) were less favourable than men's. There are stereotypes like women cannot reconcile work and family. Women, who do all or most of the housework spare a lot of expenses for the family, without financial or moral appreciation. The gender-specific analysis of Hungarian time budget surveys performed since 1993 underline several aspects of unequal opportunities of men and women. Women spend more time on socially constrained workload than men, thanks to their unilateral responsibilities in household tasks and child rearing. As 24 h make a day up, regardless of genders, this excess time should be taken away from an other set of activities, namely from leisure. Mothers with small children, women on a maternity leave, housewives and the actively working women have the smallest amount of leisure time. Women with a vocational education and those living in lower status settlements also possess less time for leisure. Analysis by age revealed, that 30-39 and 40-49-year-old women have the least leisure time. The paper also highlights at the health-mental health consequences women suffer from due to the lack of quality leisure time, and suggests the utilisation of an effective time management aided by lifestyle counsellor professionals.
Gender differences in the quality of leisure: a cross-national comparison
Community, Work & Family, 2018
Considerable work-family research has investigated the gendered division of work and care. Gender differences in leisure time have received much less attention from work-family scholars, despite the potential importance of such inequalities for women's quality of life. Combining key insights from the substantial gendered leisure studies literature with work-family scholarship, the current study examines cross-national variation in gender differences in leisure quality. Using data on 23 countries from the 2007 International Social Survey Program, we expected that women's leisure quality would be lower than men's, but the gender gap would be smaller in countries with more gender egalitarian attitudes and divisions of care (via de-familialisation and paternity leave) and where women have more bargaining power. Our results show that these country characteristics moderate the association between gender and the extent to which free time is used to relax and recover. In countries with conservative gender norms, low levels of childcare coverage, limited paternity leave and lower political power for women, women's leisure quality is lower than men's. In more egalitarian countries, the gender gap in leisure quality is lower and in some cases, reversed. These results are in line with findings from cross-national research on the gendered division of labor and offer an important contribution to understanding gender differences in leisure quality across countries. RESUMEN Numerosos estudios sobre la conciliación de la vida laboral y familiar han investigado la distribución por sexos del trabajo remunerado y las tareas domésticas y de cuidado. Las diferencias de género en tiempo de ocio han recibido mucha menos atención de los investigadores sobre conciliación, pese a la importancia potencial de esas desigualdades para la calidad de vida de las mujeres. Combinando información clave de la extensa literatura de estudios sobre ocio por género con estudios sobre conciliación de la vida laboral y familiar, el estudio analiza las diferencias de ARTICLE HISTORY
Assessing Leisure in terms of Gender
Assessing Leisure Time in terms of Gender Several moments of history have passed in which the hue and cry of women's rights and the need for equity have been raised ardently. Women have become identified as an oppressed class that has suffered unwilling and at times unwitting appropriation in a larger schema to systematically keep in check the status quo of gender relations. Not surprisingly, forms of oppression have become enmeshed in societal and even domestic spheres of activity and daily life compounding the already void sense of gender parity. Particularly in the conceptualization of work and leisure as bipolar opposites of one another, the inequitable pressure of what can be termed gender expectation comes into play giving rise to the notion of "double burden". This formulation is hardly new, as Germaine Greer in 1970 states:
Gender, Time Use, and Public Policy over the Life Cycle
Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 2005
In this paper we compare gender differences in the allocation of time to market work, domestic work, child care, and leisure over the life cycle. Time use profiles for these activity categories are constructed on survey data for three countries: Australia, the UK and Germany. We discuss the extent to which gender differences and life cycle variation in time use can be explained by public policy, focusing on the tax treatment of the female partner and on access to high quality, affordable child care. Profiles of time use, earnings and taxes are compared over the life cycle defined on age as well as on phases that represent the key transitions in the life cycle of a typical household. Our contention is that, given the decision to have children, life cycle time use and consumption decisions of households are determined by them and by public policy. Before children arrive, the adult members of the household have high labour supplies and plenty of leisure. The presence of pre-school children, in combination with the tax treatment of the second earner's income and the cost of bought-in child care, dramatically change the pattern of time use, leading to large falls in female labour supply. We also highlight the fact that, in the three countries we study, female labour supply exhibits a very high degree of heterogeneity after the arrival of children, and we show that this has important implications for public policy.
The influence of household composition on leisure time in South Africa: A gender comparison
2021
This study considers how household composition influences the leisure time of men and women in South Africa, using the South African 2010 Time Use Survey. Studying leisure time is important since the allocation of time outside the market provides insights into market behaviour and physical and mental health. Household composition and leisure consumption are highly gendered, with women typically living in larger households and consuming less leisure than men. Regression analysis shows that leisure time allocations are highly dependent on who lives in the household and Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition analysis finds that gender differences in mean leisure time can be attributed to household members, affecting the leisure time of male and female respondents differently. Overall, the results are consistent with traditional gender roles within the household and highlight the lack of intra-household bargaining power for women, providing evidence of gender inequality. Lower leisure consumption...
Inequality, leisure time and life skills: individual and social implications for well-being
2012
Some studies on inequality have taken into account the multidimensionality of individual well-being. Nevertheless, few studies have paid attention to leisure time, despite its indisputable influence on wellbeing. The first goal of the paper is to shed light on the empirical evidence on leisure time distribution and its relationship with income; some elaborations on recent data relative to the Italian time use survey 20082009 will be also shown. An evaluation of whether leisure time is correlated with income distribution, compensating for or magnifying income inequality, will be proposed. The paper will also provide an explanation of the socio-economic mechanisms and the incentive system behind the evidence on leisure time distribution and its evolution in the last decades, drawing on the theories of Veblen, Gershuny, Becker and Scitovsky. The second goal of the paper is to consider how individuals endowed with different incomes allocate their leisure time across different activities...
The role of unpaid domestic work in explaining the gender gap in the (monetary) value of leisure
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The value of travel time savings (VTTS) representing the willingness to pay to reduce travel time, consists of two components: the value of liberating time [equal to the value of leisure (VoL)] and the value of time assigned to travel (VTAT), representing the travel conditions of a trip. Their relative values indicate which dimension to emphasize when investing in transport: speed or comfort. In this paper, we formulate and estimate a framework aimed at the improvement in the estimation of the VoL. By introducing a novel treatment of time assigned to domestic work, we consider that unpaid labor should be assigned a wage rate as a measure of the expenses avoided when assigning time to those chores. We use state-of-the-art data on time use and expenses as well as online data on gig workers collected in Austria, and apply the time-use and expenditure model of Jara-Diaz et al. (Transp Res Part B 42(10):946–957, 2008). The wage rates for paid and unpaid work were combined to re-formulate...
Social Participation and Family Welfare: The Money and Time Costs of Leisure in Australia
Social Policy & Administration, 2002
The concept of social exclusion has become a central organizing concept in social policy research. Indeed “social exclusion” has displaced many of the terms formerly in use, such as “inequality”, “deprivation” and “poverty”. Social exclusion is a multidimensional concept embracing economic, social and political deprivations, that alerts us to the significance of social identity, culture, agency and, ultimately, power relations. In contrast to some earlier research traditions, the perspective of social exclusion draws our attention to how people can be “shut out of society” by their inability to participate in customary leisure activities. The ability to participate in leisure is the product of both access to leisure goods and services, and a sufficient quantity of leisure time. An analysis of Australian Household Expenditure Survey data shows that the consumption of leisure goods and services is powerfully determined by income. Consequently, low income can lead to exclusion from lei...
2007
A Comparative Gender Analysis of Italy, France, Sweden and the United States * This article analyses the extent to which changes in household composition over the life course affect the gender division of labour. It identifies and analyses cross-country disparities between France, Italy, Sweden and United States, using most recent data available from the Time Use National Surveys. We focus on gender differences in the allocation of time between market work, domestic work and leisure over the life-cycle. In order to map the lifecycle, we distinguish between nine key cross-country comparable life stages according to age and family structure such as exiting parental home, union formation, parenthood, and retiring from work. By using appropriate regression techniques (Tobit with selection, Tobit and OLS), we show large discrepancies in the gender division of labour at the different life stages. This gender gap exists in all countries at any stage of the life course, but is usually smaller at the two ends of the age distribution, and larger with parenthood. Beyond social norms, the impact of parenthood on time allocation varies across countries, being smaller in those where work-family balance policies are more effective and traditionally wellestablished.