Some mornings are chaos, after getting them of to school I’ll have a cup of tea and a sit down, then I’ll try and get all the housework done so that I can get of to work for 12.00 and that’s as busy as getting the kids of, you know, start the washing, do some ironing, make the beds, then the washing finishes, so I stop what I’m doing and peg it out . . . . Work is easy, the most relaxing part of the day because I only have to do one thing.43
Here we see the harried experience of temporal disorganization, as Chloe rushes to meet the institutionally fixed school meeting times, as well as that caused by the temporal density of housework. Such examples proliferate in the feminist literature about how women in dual-earner families constantly juggle their work and households tasks.44 The fear has been that working women will simply add a “second shift” of paid employment to their existing responsibilities for housework and child care. This lies behind the suggestion that women are sufering from time poverty. There is now talk of a gender gap in leisure.
We began this chapter by making a case for regarding discretionary time as an important measure of freedom and equality. Indeed, Nancy Fraser has argued that gender equity needs to be reconceptualized as a “complex notion comprising a plurality of distinct normative principles.”45 One of the seven principles that she proposes as crucial to gender equity concerns the distribution of leisure time. This issue is more complex than it first appears. Taking into account temporal density leads to a reformulation of the gender gap in leisure. The crucial issue is not only that women may have less leisure time, but that women’s leisure time may be qualitatively “less leisurely” than men’s.
So do women, as is commonly claimed, have comparatively less leisure time than men? In the United States, employed mothers’ combined time in paid and unpaid work exceeds that of fathers, as noted earlier. Surprisingly, however, this diference is not substantial. Analyzing time-use data from ten countries that are members of the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, we found that, when taking paid and unpaid work together, there is little diference in the number of minutes men and women spend in “work.”46 Unpaid work (housework, child care, and shopping) continues to be highly gender specialized in that women’s share is approximately three-quarters. But despite this, the quantity (the number of hours) of leisure time that men and women have is remarkably similar.
The Time-Pressure Paradox
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