Men, Women and Work
March 18, 2003
One
of the staple feminist claims heard every March during International Women's
Day and Women's History Month is that "women do the work of the world."
This myth was publicized by the United Nations during the 1970s ("Women
constitute one half of the world's population [and] do two-thirds of the
world's work") and reinforced in 1995 with the release of its "Human Development
Report" and the presentation of the report at the UN International Women's
Conference in Beijing. The report's claim that women do more work than
men was reported widely and uncritically by the US media with headlines
such as "It's Official: Women Do Work Harder" and "A Woman's Work is Never
Done."
To judge who does "the work of the world" in a world of over six billion
people is a gargantuan task, but let's begin by asking two questions:
1) Who works the most hours (inside or outside the home) in the average
family unit worldwide?
2) Who does the most demanding and dangerous work?
The second question is much easier to answer than the first, so let's
start there. According to the International Labor Organization, an estimated
1.1 million workers are killed in industrial accidents each year, exceeding
the number killed from war, violence, road accidents and AIDS.
These accidents occur primarily in mining, logging, heavy agricultural
labor, construction, fishing, heavy manufacturing and various other overwhelmingly
male jobs. The ILO estimates that 600,000 lives would be saved every year
if available safety practices were used. The ILO also estimates that there
are approximately 250 million victims of occupational accidents and 160
million victims of occupational diseases each year. The ILO doesn't keep
figures by gender, but in countries where such figures are available (such
as South Africa, England, Australia and Canada), the fatalities and serious
injuries are usually over 90 percent male.
The gender breakdowns in the US are little different. According to the
Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were over 125 million workplace injuries
in the United States between 1976 and 1999. Nearly 100,000 American workers
died from job-related injuries over the past decade and a half, 95% of
them men. Of the 25 most dangerous jobs listed by the US Department of
Labor, all of them are between 90 percent and 100 percent male. According
to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, more than three
million workers a year are treated in hospital emergency rooms for occupational
injuries and nearly 50 American workers are injured every minute of the
40-hour work week. On average, every working day 25 workers die, 24 of
them male.
So there is no doubt that the most dangerous and demanding jobs are done
by men, in most if not virtually every society, and that men shoulder
the burden of dangerous labor in the US Let's consider the other question:
Who works the most hours (inside or outside the home) in the average family
unit worldwide? It's a much harder question to answer but, as best as
can be told, the average man is doing at least as much as the average
woman is.
As men's issues author Warren Farrell explained in his 1999 book Women
Can't Hear What Men Don't Say , the UN report upon which most claims
of "women work more" are based was deeply flawed. In fact, UN official
Terry McKinley admitted in February, 1996 that the UN misrepresented the
study in several important ways. For one, the information provided by
the UN to the press only applied to countries where women were found to
work more hours than men; the countries where men were found to work more
hours than women were deliberately excluded.
Moreover, when the data provided by researchers in some countries (including
the US) did not fit the UN's intention to show that women "do more," researchers
were asked in a private communication to amend their studies. Researchers
were asked to include women's voluntary community work as well as hobbies
in order to increase women's perceived workload. Researchers were not
asked to include these items or new ones in men's labor. As a study of
men and women's labor, the UN findings are worthless.
Even if one could possibly do an effective study on how many hours the
average man and woman worked inside and outside the home worldwide, a
finding that women work more hours would not mean that women work "harder"
or "more" because such a study would still not account for the more difficult
and dangerous nature of men's work.
Feminists have made similar claims of "women do more" in relation to the
division of labor in the United States. The idea of what Farrell calls
the "second shift woman and the shiftless man" was brought into vogue
in large part by UC Berkeley professor Arlie Hochschild's best-selling
1989 book The Second Shift. In it she wrote (and the media uncritically
repeated) "women work an extra month of 24 hour days each year."
However, as Farrell notes, Hochschild arrived at her "women do more" conclusion
through a variety of disreputable gimmicks. For one, she compared the
housework burdens of full-time employed males with those of part-time
employed females, portraying men working 50 hour weeks as lazy and selfish
for not doing as much housework as their wives who were working a 20 hour
week. Also, she claimed that men did no more housework in the late 1980s
than in the pre-feminist era, but, with one minor exception, she used
data on male housework from studies done in the pre-feminist era, rendering
it worthless. In addition, she also defined "housework" to include chores
usually done by women, ignoring many of the household tasks generally
performed by men.
In reality, objective, scientifically credible studies have shown that
American women are not working more or harder than men. For example, the
UN's survey on the United States showed that American men work three more
hours a week on average than American women. The Journal of Economic
Literature reports that the average man works five hours more, and
a study released last year by the University of Michigan Institute for
Social Research, the world's largest academic survey and research organization,
put the disparity at three more male hours per week.
In addition, these surveys (both the serious ones and the feminist advocacy
ones) count only hours worked. A man doing eight hours of dangerous construction
work in the 100-degree heat is credited with no more "work" than a woman
who works in an air-conditioned office or who, in the comfort and safety
of her own home (and without a supervisor breathing down her neck), cooks
breakfast, takes the kids to school, packs her husband's lunch and folds
the laundry while chatting on the phone.
Nevertheless, as Farrell notes, negative references to men and housework
litter our popular culture. "The Myth of Male Housework: For Women, Toil
Looms >From Sun to Sun" was a headline in one major publication, over
a cartoon depicting a woman juggling (and struggling) with a baby, a roasted
turkey, and a house pet, while her husband watches TV and "juggles" his
beer and his potato chips. Other major publications have highlighted women's
alleged burdens under headlines such as "For Women, Having It All May
Mean Doing It All," and "The Trouble with Men," with one even commenting,
"A woman's work is never done, a man is drunk from sun to sun."
Feminists are correct to be concerned about the plight of the women in
the underdeveloped nations of the world. Their error is that they blame
men. The enemy of most of the women of the world is not the man who works
hard to provide for his wife and children, but instead the grinding poverty
that wreaks devastation on everybody: men, women and children.
