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Is It Just Too Hard? Gender Time Symmetry in Market and Nonmarket Work and Subjective Time Pressure in Australia, Finland, and Korea

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Gender and Time Use in a Global Context

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Abstract

Gender equality in time spent in market work and in housework and family care is widely seen as desirable, potentially enhancing women’s financial security and allowing men to participate more fully in family life, but does gendered time equality engender higher subjective time stress than gender specialization? This chapter uses time use data from Australia, Finland, and Korea to compare the reported time stress of men and women in time use equality households versus those in more gender specialized households. The findings provide evidence of a complex interplay among social norms, policy regimes, average weekly employment hours, and time stress from equality of time use. Time stress of equality is lowest in Finland where average hours of employment are low for men.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    All descriptive statistics and models were weighted to account for unequal distribution of days of the week, as appropriate. Standard errors were estimated using the Taylor linearization to take into account that the matched husbands and wives were clustered within households and diary days within individuals. Analyses were performed using Stata version 14.0.

  2. 2.

    Unless otherwise noted, all comparisons deemed significant were significant at p < 0.001.

  3. 3.

    Significant at p < 0.05.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

    Lyn Craig

  2. Social Policy Research Centre, University of New South Wales, Kensington, NSW, Australia

    Judith E. Brown

  3. National Centre for Epidemiology & Population Health, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia

    Lyndall Strazdins

  4. Department of Sociology, University of Oxford, Oxford, England

    Jiweon Jun

Authors
  1. Lyn Craig
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  2. Judith E. Brown
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  3. Lyndall Strazdins
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  4. Jiweon Jun
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Lyn Craig .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Bowdoin College Dept of Economics, Brunswick, Maine, USA

    Rachel Connelly

  2. Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, USA

    Ebru Kongar

Appendix

Appendix

Table A.1 Primary/main activity codes for Italy, Australia and Korea
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Table A.2 Regression coefficients for time spent in market and nonmarket work by country
Full size table

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Craig, L., Brown, J.E., Strazdins, L., Jun, J. (2017). Is It Just Too Hard? Gender Time Symmetry in Market and Nonmarket Work and Subjective Time Pressure in Australia, Finland, and Korea. In: Connelly, R., Kongar, E. (eds) Gender and Time Use in a Global Context. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56837-3_18

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56837-3_18

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  • Print ISBN: 978-1-137-56836-6

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