Whatever feminists say — and he calls himself a feminist — men are doing more housework than they used to, according to Jonathan Gershuny, head of the Centre for Time Use Research at Oxford University.
So when was the last time he carried out a domestic chore? “I cleaned the cooker yesterday,” he says. “I actually enjoyed it because it’s not a normal thing. And it happens that I have this extremely beautiful ceramic surface. And it’s a distraction from this incredibly irritating stuff …”
He gestures towards the computer, books and charts scattered around his desk. “What’s more, it’s a displacement activity with immediate returns. Because I write this stuff and it’s probably wrong, and no one’s going to see it for 18 months, and even then they’ll disagree with it, whereas I polish this beautiful bit of ceramic and OK, I don’t get much from it, but at least I can see my face in it when I’ve polished it.”
Clearly, collecting and analysing information about how people spend the minutes of their day-to-day lives — as Gershuny has been doing for more than 30 years of his — and how they feel about the way they spend their time, is more complicated than it looks.
The implications of this painstaking and detailed work are also far-reaching, tapping not only into questions of work/life balance and male/female relations but also the economy, the environment, future lifestyles and personal fulfilment. “It is the things that you do during the day that determine the sort of life you have,” says Gershuny.
Much of Gershuny’s life over the next five years will be determined by his recent receipt of a £1,9-million grant from the United Kingdom Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).
This will allow Gershuny and his colleagues at the Centre for Time Use Research to analyse not only the time spent on particular activities but also on how one activity follows on from another and how the activities of different family members interact. In the process, he hopes to get closer to an understanding of how the way people spend their time changes over time and between countries.
The bases of this work, and of all his work over the past three decades, are time-use diaries. These are specially structured diaries in which people note down exactly what they have been doing, who they have been doing it with and, in their own words, what they felt about it.
Mostly, the diaries he uses have been collected by other people — generally national offices of statistics or other academics. The first diaries he used were viewer and listener availability surveys from the BBC dating back to the late 1930s. But he has also collected diary information himself.
There are inevitably problems with this kind of data. Gershuny tells the story of an early time-use survey carried out in the 1950s among students in Boston. In the section of the diary labelled “kissing and cuddling” male respondents reported spending about half an hour a day on the activity compared to about three minutes for women. And there are other complications, which Gershuny hopes the more detailed ESRC-funded analysis will help to reduce.
Take childcare, for example. A woman might report spending only one hour a day on childcare. But dig a bit further and you are likely to find that while she is washing up, watching TV or doing the vacuuming, the child is also there, so in fact the time she actually spends on childcare is closer to 10 hours.
Nevertheless, Gershuny has managed to gather 60 reliable surveys carried out in 30 countries, dating back more than 40 years. Through analysis of these he has been able to identify dramatic shifts in the ways people have been spending their time.
One of these is that between the 1960s and late 1980s the number of hours people spent doing paid work fell steeply, although that trend is now reversing in the UK. At the same time, the amount of time spent in unpaid work rose. This is because rather than take a train, for example, driven by a driver paid for his work, we now drive ourselves.
While, according to the diaries, people enjoy the way they spend their time slightly more than they used to, most of this appears to be because of the decline in manual paid work. “Arguably … such real improvement as we have experienced is this net change in enjoyment of the paid work we do,” says Gershuny, “rather than the fact that we are doing less of it.”
Then there is the housework issue. In all the countries surveyed, including the whole of Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, the diaries show that women are doing about an hour less housework than they did 40 years ago. At the same time, men have more than doubled what they once did, although since this was only about 15 minutes a day in the first place, domestic gods remain rare. —