Abstract
Absolute as well as relative hours of paid and unpaid work may influence well-being. This study investigates whether absolute hours spent on paid work and housework account for the lower well-being among women as compared to men in Europe, and whether the associations between well-being and hours of paid work and housework differ by gender attitudes and social context. Attitudes towards women’s and men’s paid work and housework obligations may influence how beneficial or detrimental it is to spend time on these activities, as may social comparison of one’s own hours to the number of hours commonly spent among similar others. A group of 13,425 women and men from 25 European countries are analysed using country fixed-effects models. The results suggest that while men’s well-being appears to be unaffected by hours of paid work and housework, women’s well-being increases with increased paid working hours and decreases with increasing housework hours. Gender differences in time spent on paid work and housework account for a third of the European gender difference in well-being and are thus one reason that women have lower well-being than men have. Gender attitudes do not appear to modify the associations between hours and well-being, but there is a tendency for women’s well-being to be higher the less housework they do compared to other women in the same family situation and country. However, absolute hours of paid work and housework appear to be more important to women’s well-being than relative hours.
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Notes
A full table of sample sizes and proportions of females in each country are available from the author upon request.
A more detailed categorization of the age of the youngest child would have been preferable but is not possible to use due to the small number of cases in the resulting reference groups.
Firstly, the UK data have one tertiary level, whereas the common European categorization has two. UK respondents are therefore coded “First stage of tertiary” if they have tertiary education and their educational years do not exceed 16 years, and “Second stage of tertiary” if they have tertiary education and have studied for 17 years or more. Secondly, a majority of the UK respondents are originally coded “Lower secondary or second stage of basic”, but in the rest of Europe, respondents with more than 11 years of schooling are included in the next educational level, “Upper secondary”. Therefore, when educational years exceed 11 years among UK respondents, they are moved to the level “Upper secondary”. Finally, the UK data include the additional category “Other”. Respondents in this category have values on educational years corresponding to the educational years among other European respondents coded “Upper secondary”. Therefore, UK respondents in the “Other” category are here re-coded into the educational level “Upper secondary”.
Women in Turkey score rather low on the gender attitudes index, and if Turkish respondents are excluded, women appear to be slightly more egalitarian than men, although the gender difference is not statistically significant.
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Acknowledgments
This paper was produced as part of the Economic Change, Quality of Life and Social Cohesion (EQUALSOC) Network of Excellence, funded by the European Commission (DG Research) as part of the Sixth Framework Programme. See editors’ introduction for further details. This paper has greatly benefited from comments and suggestions from Olof Bäckman, Jan O. Jonsson and Marie Evertsson, from the anonymous Social Indicators Research reviewers and from the authors and editors of this special issue.
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Boye, K. Relatively Different? How do Gender Differences in Well-Being Depend on Paid and Unpaid Work in Europe?. Soc Indic Res 93, 509–525 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-008-9434-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-008-9434-1