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The Time-Crunch Paradox

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Abstract

Previous research has shown little difference in the average leisure time of men and women. This finding is a challenge to the second shift argument, which suggests that increases in female labor market hours have not been compensated by equal decreases in household labor. This paper presents time-use and leisure satisfaction data for a variety of western European countries, and shows that accounting for socio-economic factors that differ between men and women is vital for understanding gender differences. We find that working mothers have leisure levels that are much lower than those of working fathers and singles. Working mothers are also most likely to report the least satisfaction with free time. Finding that time stress and leisure time are positively correlated within socio-demographic groups suggests that the second shift argument is still valid, and that feelings of time stress are indeed associated with the lack of leisure time.

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Notes

  1. See Robinson and Godbey (1999), and Bianchi et al. (2006) for evidence for the US, Beaujot (2001) for evidence for Canada, and Gershuny (2000) for evidence for Britain. A comparison of time use in 10 OECD countries replicates these findings (e.g., Bittman and Wajcman 2000).

  2. The Harmonized European Time Use Surveys do contain information on whether individuals feel pressure for time, as do some American Time Use surveys (e.g., Robinson and Godbey 1999). However, the question of interest in this paper is about satisfaction with leisure in a broader sense, which might not be entirely captured by feelings of time stress. More importantly, all these surveys are cross-sectional studies.

  3. Information on the variables, and on how to access the data, is available on the MTUS website: http://www.timeuse.org/mtus/. See Gauthier et al. (2002) for a full description of the MTUS documentation. We use version W5.5.2.

  4. Interestingly, the magnitude of the female dummy reported in Sect. 3 is very similar regardless of the different definition of leisure used, which suggest that sample compositional effects play a greater role in explaining the differences in leisure time between men and women than the concept of leisure used.

  5. A detailed description of the control variables can be found in "Appendix".

  6. For expositional purposes we only present the results for the pooled sample in the main text. The main conclusion from the pool country regressions can be generalized to each country individually. It is beyond the scope of the present paper to categorize countries according to different behaviors. Rather, we highlight a general pattern across all countries in the sample.

  7. Most studies have found average differences between men and women that range from about 1 to 4 h per week. The divergence across these estimates lie on the definition of leisure. For instance, Aguiar and Hurst (2007) rely on 4 definitions of leisure in their analysis, from the narrower that includes leisure activities such as Watching TV and sports, to the wider that is defined as the residual of total work. Burda et al. (2008) use one of definition of leisure that excludes the time devoted to sleep and personal care.

  8. Leisure satisfaction has been multiplied by 100 for consistency with other columns.

  9. The MTUS does not contain health information, making it impossible for us to test whether health is important for leisure time as well.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful for the financial support provided by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science (Project ECO2008-01297) and by the Economic and Social Research Council through the Centre for Time Use Research to Almudena Sevilla-Sanz (RES-060-25–0037); This paper has greatly benefited from the comments at the Annual Conference of the European Association for Labour Economics (Amsterdam, 2008).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, University of Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain

    Jose Ignacio Gimenez-Nadal

  2. Department of Economics and Centre for Time Use Research, University of Oxford, Manor Road Building, Manor Road, Oxford, OX1 3UQ, UK

    Almudena Sevilla-Sanz

Authors
  1. Jose Ignacio Gimenez-Nadal
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  2. Almudena Sevilla-Sanz
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Correspondence to Almudena Sevilla-Sanz.

Appendix

Appendix

1.1 ECHP

  • Leisure satisfaction: This corresponds with the pk004-satisfaction with the amount of leisure time-question of the ECHP, an ordered variable taking values from 1 to 6 (from not satisfied to very satisfied).

  • Man: Gender of the individual. It takes value “1” for men and “0” for women. This corresponds with the PD003 question of the ECHP.

  • Age: Age at the time of the interview. This corresponds with the PD003 question of the ECHP. We compute the Age Squared to allow for non-linearities in the effect of age.

  • Marital Status: We control for the marital status (married or cohabiting) of the individuals. Dummy variable (0–1). This variable takes value “1” if the individual is married or cohabiting, and “0” otherwise (PD005 and PD008).

  • University Education: The highest level of general or higher education completed is the recognized third level. This corresponds with the PT022 = 1 question of the ECHP. Dummy variable (0–1).

  • Secondary Education: The highest level of general or higher education completed is the second stage of secondary level of education. This corresponds with the PT022 = 2 question of the ECHP. Dummy variable (0–1).

  • Low Education: The highest level of general or higher education completed is less than the second stage of secondary level of education. This corresponds with the PT022 = 3 question of the ECHP. Dummy variable (0–1). This is the omitted variable in the regressions.

  • Working part-time: To indicate whether the reference person is working part time (1) or not (2). Corresponds to the value “2” in the PE005C variable.

  • Working full-time: To indicate whether the reference person is working full time (1) or not (2). Corresponds to the value “1” in the PE005C variable.

  • Number of children 0–16: We control for the number of children aged under 16 within the household (HL001 + HL004).

  • Health: Self-assessment of the individual’s health. Dummy variable that takes values from “1” (Very Good Health) to “5” (Very Poor Health). We create a dummy variable for each value (Very Poor Health, Poor Health, Good Health, Very Good Health) and the omitted value or the reference value is that corresponding to very poor health.

1.2 MTUS

  • Man: Gender of the individual. It takes value “1” for men and “0” for women. This corresponds with the SEX question of the MTUS.

  • Age: Age at the time of the interview. This corresponds with the AGE2 question of the MTUS. We compute the Age Squared to allow for non-linearities in the effect of age.

  • Marital Status: We control for the marital status (married or cohabiting) of the individuals. Dummy variable (0–1). This variable takes value “1” if the individual is married or cohabiting, and “0” otherwise (CIVSTAT = 1 in the MTUS).

  • University Education: The highest level of general or higher education completed is the recognized third level. This corresponds with the EDUCTRY = 3 question of the MTUS. Dummy variable (0–1).

  • Secondary Education: The highest level of general or higher education completed is the second stage of secondary level of education. This corresponds with the EDUCTRY = 2 question of the MTUS. Dummy variable (0–1).

  • Low Education: The highest level of general or higher education completed is less than the second stage of secondary level of education. This corresponds with the EDUCTRY = 1 question of the MTUS. Dummy variable (0–1). This is the omitted variable in the regressions.

  • Working part-time: To indicate whether the reference person is working part time (1) or not (2). Corresponds to the value “2” and “3” in the EMPSTAT3 variable of the MTUS.

  • Working full-time: To indicate whether the reference person is working full time (1) or not (2). Corresponds to the value “1” in the EMPSTAT3 variable of the MTUS.

  • Number of children 0–18: We control for the number of children aged under 18 within the household (NCHILD).

  • Period 90–95: Since some authors have found a significant increase in the amount of leisure in recent years (Aguiar and Hurst 2007), we include a dummy variable to control for the period when the survey was carried out, so that we are able to see whether the amount of leisure has changed (increased or decreased) over the years, in the countries that have observations in both periods.

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Gimenez-Nadal, J.I., Sevilla-Sanz, A. The Time-Crunch Paradox. Soc Indic Res 102, 181–196 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-010-9689-1

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