The mainstream hoax

Wikipedia's page on Double Burden (part of a series on Feminism) writes:

[...] in couples where both partners have paid jobs, women often spend significantly more time than men on household chores and caring work, such as childrearing or caring for sick family members.

The Conversation, priding itself by "Academic rigour, journalistic flair" writes:

Naturally, the more time spent on chores, the less a woman has to spend on other activities like sleep, work, and leisure.

(Linking to a study that does not even measure differences between men and women.)

The European Institute for Gender Equality wrote in it's 2022 Gender Equality Index report:

Women’s disproportionate burden of unpaid care work hinders their engagement in paid work.

Data tell a different story

Before we continue, let me tell you more about the data I am going to use. Our friend Eurostat runs Harmonised European time use surveys (HETUS), which divides human life into hundreds of distinct activities, including sleeping, eating, dishwashing commuting to work etc. (see HETUS 2008 guidelines [1] page 159). The last survey took place back in 2010, which isn't too bad, and the data is available for 17 EU countries plus Turkey. Unfortunately, out of hundreds of distinct activities only 56 high level aggregate categories are publicly available. To get access to the complete "microdata" I would have to be a registered research institution.

But that is not a bad start. Our first step will be the dataset Time spent in total work (paid and unpaid) by sex. Bit annoyingly the labels "paid work" and "unpaid work" are not among the 56 known categories but the helpful online support staff at Eurostat provided an answer. Paid work is everything in the 100 Employment category, including travel to work, preparations and even lunch break. The unpaid work is everything in the 200 Household and Family Care category, including laundry, shopping, food preparation, child care, help to an adult family member, gardening, construction and repair etc. Added to that is 410 Organisational work (all kinds of volunteering) and 420 Informal help to other household, which includes for instance 423 Care of own children living in another household, which is basically fathers spending time with their own children that live with their mother. In any case, the contribution of 410 and 420 to overall unpaid work is very small and somewhat quite similar for both men and women.

Two more notes: First, people often do more than one thing at a time and there are several ways to capture this, but we will be looking at so called "time spent in main activity" variable which always adds up to 24 hours for every day.

Second, all the numbers are self-reported, full of strange quirks, possibly statistical artefacts - that does not mean they are unreliable, just don't stake you life on them.

Women do more unpaid work ...

The first thing to notice is that while there are huge differences between the HETUS countries there is no "EU average" - because the HETUS data is for 17 EU countries only. But this makes reasoning about the data difficult. For instance, in Netherland, men spend 18 minutes more every day in paid and unpaid work that women (M 5:55 vs F 5:37) - a stark opposite to Greece where women work on average 87 minutes longer (M 4:54 vs F 6:21).

Without the "microdata", it does not make much sense to just average the HETUS countries - Germany's population is some 60-times bigger than Estonia's. But because I don't have any other option I am going to do exactly that. Just remember: these are averages for countries, the averages for populations in those countries would be slightly different.

Without further ado: across 18 European countries, women do almost twice as much unpaid work as men.

Time spent in total work (paid and unpaid work as main activity) by sex

- Paid work Unpaid work Total work
Men 3:21:17 2:12:47 5:33:04
Women 2:00:47 4:11:43 6:12:30
Dif 1:20:30 -1:58:57 -0:38:27

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/bookmark/3f3773fd-bd3a-4d14-83b3-cf70445602da?lang=en

..but that is only a half of the picture

As expected, men do significantly more paid work. In total, women work 38 minutes more than men. Out of the average 6 hours and 40 minutes of work every day that is a small but not insignificant 10% difference.

Why do men do more paid work and women do more unpaid work? Could the answer be that husbands go to work while wives take care of children and home? Quite possibly yes. And isn't comparing paid and unpaid work something like counting apples and oranges? Certainly.

But let's look at something else. When after the age of 65 the paid work almost disappears for both men and women, men start to do almost one hour of unpaid work more. Does it mean the total work gap shrinks? No, the opposite happens, women's unpaid work is also up 20 minutes and in the end the total gap almost doubles to an average of 70 minutes more total work for women after 65.

Time spent in the main activity by sex, 65 years and over

- Paid work Unpaid work Total work
Men 65+ 0:25:57 3:05:57 3:31:04
Women 65+ 0:09:40 4:32:03 4:41:43
Dif 65+ 0:16:17 -1:26:07 -1:09:50

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/bookmark/9ae399fa-80c1-4b90-aef9-fd9c80f29b7e?lang=en

Is it possible, that the gender life expectancy gap - men die on average 6 years sooner than women - has something to do with the difference? Quite possibly yes. But more importantly, at this point you have probably guessed the corollary: if the gap after 65+ is twice as big as the total, that means the gap for employment-age men and women must be smaller than those 38 minutes. Unfortunately the "microdata" for a working age cohort is not available to an amateur sociologist like me and real academics don't seem to be interested in publishing research in this area. As one academic told me: they know very well which side of the bread is buttered on.

The uncomfortable(?) truth

But there is more, much more. Eurostat also splits the HATUS data by sex and household composition including one specific cohort: another household arrangement, aka people not in a couple, not caring for children and not living with their parents.

Data for this cohort offers a shocking insight that is totally missing form the public discourse: When left to their own preferences women choose to do more shopping, more cleaning, more food preparation, more laundry - more unpaid work in general than men. While men choose to spend more time doing paid work.

Compared to men, women in this cohort spend on average 5 more minutes shopping, 7 more minutes caring for pets and 12 more minutes preparing food. Because they want to?

Person less than 45 years old, in another household arrangement with no children younger than 18 years old

- Paid work Unpaid work Total work
Single men 4:11:36 1:36:16 5:47:52
Single women 3:40:00 2:14:44 5:54:44
Dif 0:31:36 -0:38:28 -0:06:52

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/bookmark/8b6bfa4d-c6f9-48ef-9225-11028a9aaaaa?lang=en

Note: taking care of sick or elderly parents or relative living in different household is counted under the 420 Informal help to other household category. In our "another household arrangement" cohort men contribute on average 3 minutes more to helping others than women.

Further reading

The 2011 American Time Use Survey seem to support the same conclusion: see The Myth of the ‘Lazy’ Father | Institute for Family Studies

The Pew Research Center shows that American fathers spend more time in paid+unpaid work than mothers: 8 facts about American dads