Something That's Sure To Shock You: Leisure Gap + Job Loss = Bigger Leisure Gap

Ha! Here's a blast from the past, but with an update for these modern times.

We all remember from our women's studies classes (or in my case, my college boyfriend's roommate's women's studies class) about the leisure gap, right? The findings made by Arlie Hochschild in her 1989 book The Second Shift that in two-income hetero households, in which both partners do equal amounts of paid work, women do the majority of all household and childcare tasks? In case you were wondering, the American Time Use Study, a project of the feds, suggests that is still the case.

But! And here's were the timeliness comes in: "When women are unemployed and looking for a job, the time they spend daily taking care of children nearly doubles. Unemployed men’s child care duties, by contrast, are virtually identical to those of their working counterparts, and they instead spend more time sleeping, watching TV and looking for a job, along with other domestic activities."

And why might this be? John Baruch, a man featured in the Times story who's been out of work since January 2008, is too busy treating job hunting as a full-time job to walk the dog. Which is great in theory, but one, if you're spending 8plus hours solid looking for a job, you are probably doing it wrong--you have time to walk the damn dog. And two, it reflects the relative value placed on men's work versus women's work in way too many U.S. households. It could go one of two ways (though is probably some combination of the two): If the work women did at home was valued by their male partners, men would pick up more of the housekeeping tasks following a layoff when they had more time. Or if women's paid work was valued more by their male partners, they wouldn't be picking up quite so much more housekeeping work during their out-of-work time because they and their partners would be busy attempting to return to the paid work force.