Keywords

Introduction

Women’s and men’s time use remains stubbornly gendered; despite women’s movement into paid work, they continue to do more housework and childcare and less market work than men (Man, Sullivan, & Gershuny, 2011; Sayer, 2010) . Women’s and men’s time is more similar today than compared to the 1970s and earlier, but convergence is due to women changing more than men (Sayer, 2005; Sullivan & Gershuny, 2001) . While women continue to do more housework and childcare than men, most women are not putting in a “second shift ,” because they continue to spend less time in paid work than men (Sayer, England, Bittman, & Bianchi, 2009). Mothers who are employed full time and have preschool age children spend more combined time in paid work, housework , and childcare compared to comparable men, but women do not spend more time than men in paid work and household work in other couple types (Milkie, Raley, & Bianchi, 2009) .

Despite apparent equality in work time, the negative consequences of gendered divisions of labor are well-documented (Bianchi, Robinson, & Milkie, 2006; England, 2011) . Women’s higher levels of housework and childcare depress labor force participation , wages, and occupational mobility (Connelly & Kimmel, 2009; Hersch & Stratton, 1997) . Women’s greater caregiving responsibilities and the “third shift ” of necessary emotion work required for smooth family functioning and positive relationships are associated with more stress and morbidity among women (Bird & Rieker, 2008) . Men too are disadvantaged by current gendered time regimes. Barriers to dismantling the breadwinner scaffolding undergirding hegemonic masculinity, like the flexibility stigma that penalizes men who take time from paid work for family, hinder men’s willingness to prioritize caregiving (Williams, 2010) . Men’s reduced time in housework and caring may be associated with fatherhood wage premiums but also weaker relationships with spouses and children (Elliott & Umberson, 2008; Hodges & Budig, 2010) .

This broad-brush story of gender inequality in time use and its implications for well-being, however, are limited; in that, it does not consider how gendered time allocations may vary by education and family status. Education-differentiated pathways into parenthood and marriage and increased likelihood of living alone in young and older adulthood may alter the activities in which individuals engage and the amount of time spent on various activities. Objective and subjective aspects of time may be redefined across the life stage, as women and men transition into and out of employment and family roles. Consequently, gender gaps in time use may be conditioned by education and family status.

This chapter provides new information about gendered time use patterns in three ways. First, it examines if the influences of education and family status on gendered time use patterns vary by historical time. Second, it addresses limitations in existing work that focus only on gender differences between women and men in coupled heterosexual relationships by examining gender gaps in time use among single women and men with no children and single mothers and fathers, as well as married women and men. Last, it considers gender gaps in all types of time use . Prior work examines gender differences in only one or two types of time use . While useful, this work provides incomplete knowledge about how education and family status in particular affect the gender division of labor and whether influences have waxed or waned over time. Examining gender gaps and trends for all adult women and men across all domains of time use is needed to fully understand how and why time use is associated with gender inequality , and why the trend toward convergence appears to have stalled.

This chapter first reviews the dominant theoretical perspectives on gendered time use . It then provides a descriptive overview of trends in daily time allocation of women and men to paid work, housework , childcare , self-care , and leisure . Gender differences at each point in time and change in gender gaps over time are the focus. The chapter then examines how gender gaps in time use are conditioned by educational attainment and family status, and how the influence of these factors has changed over time.

Several factors have contributed to greater similarity since the 1960s in the gender division of labor . The 1964 Civil Rights Act, and related legislative efforts like Title IX, reduced structural and normative barriers to women’s education and employment. The development of more effective means of contraception, the legalization of abortion, and the era of “free love” afforded women and men the opportunity to engage in couple and parental relationships outside of legal heterosexual marriage (Casper & Bianchi, 2002) . Nonmarital fertility increased, with 40 % of births now occurring outside of married heterosexual relationships (Cohen, 2014) . Norms changed in ways that emphasized self-reliance and self-fulfillment more than self-sacrifice and caring for others (Coontz, 2005; Gerson, 2010) . Demographic and cultural shifts ushered in an era of independent adulthood, evident in data documenting the substantial increase in living alone throughout the life course (Klinenberg, 2012; Rosenfeld, 2007) . Heightened demand for women’s labor and ideologies of egalitarianism in women’s and men’s educational and employment opportunities are associated with increased human capital among women, particularly in education where women now outpace men in earning college degrees (DiPrete & Buchmann, 2013) . Employment among mothers is now normative, and trend data indicate mothers of newborns are returning to employment more quickly than in the past (Smith, Downs, & O’Connell, 2001) . However, the puzzle is why women’s progress in all arenas excepting education stalled in the 1990s (Cotter, Hermsen, & Vanneman, 2011) . This chapter is a first step at investigating what gendered time use trends between 1965 and 2012 portend for the gender revolution.

Background

Time is a social fact based on normative and economic conventions and one that is strongly associated with well-being. Although all individuals have the same 24 h of time per day, how people use and control their time varies by their social location. Hence, time can be studied empirically to reveal its links with structural relations of power and individual behavior. Theoretical perspectives emphasize how available time is constrained by the zero sum nature of the 24 h day, resource differences between women and men, and cultural beliefs about gender that associate caregiving with femininity and breadwinning with masculinity as the dominant influences on the gendered division of labor (England, 2011; Sayer, 2010) .

The time availability hypothesis posits that decisions about paid work affect how much time is “left over” for childcare and housework (Coverman & Sheley, 1986) . Employment status and (sometimes) spouse employment status are typically used as measures of competing time demands. This hypothesis is supported by much empirical research, but the same studies also document robust and persistent influences of “gender” (Bianchi, Sayer, Milkie, & Robinson, 2012; Craig & Mullan, 2013) . Employment and hours of market work are negatively associated with women’s and men’s time in housework, childcare, and leisure , net of marital and parental status, but effects are stronger for women than for men (Sayer, 2005) . However, women’s average paid work hours are lower than men’s, and women are more likely to leave the labor force when their male partners have long employment hours (Stone, 2007) .

Gender has pervasive effects at all levels of society and it structures identities, expectations, norms, and institutions. Men and women may have a vested interest in maintaining gendered allocations of paid and unpaid work time because these naturalize and reinforce cultural beliefs about “essential” differences between women and men and sustain men’s greater societal resources and status (Charles & Bradley, 2009; Jackman, 1994) .

The time availability and gender perspectives were initially framed as competing theories, but empirical results supporting elements of both suggest they are both useful frames (Ferree, 2010; Sayer, 2010) . Although used more in research examining time use among married couple households, the perspectives can be usefully adapted to apply to all women and men (Shelton, 1992) . Competing time demands are an issue in all households because only so many activities can be accomplished with the constraints of the 24 h day. Examining within and across gender differences by marital and parental status should offer insight into whether displays of gendered behavior are activated more strongly in couple and/or parental relationships. Social prescriptions for gendered behavior likely affect all women and men, regardless of parental or marital status. Evidence is mixed on whether couples who desire a more specialized division of labor select into marriage, or if instead the institution of marriage constrains options in ways that push women and men into male breadwinner , female caregiver arrangements (Cooke & Baxter, 2010) . Transitions into marriage increase and exits from marriage decrease women’s household labor, whereas the effects of transitions are the opposite for men’s housework , but the influence of marriage may also have waned in recent decades (Bianchi et al., 2012; Gupta, 1999) . Parenthood is the role that is more closely associated with women’s reduced paid work hours and increased household and childcare work, and men’s increased work hours, even among couples with egalitarian patterns before the birth of the child (Grunow, Schulz, & Blossfeld, 2012) . This suggests “doing gender” may have stronger effects on women’s and men’s time use in married parent households compared with singles living alone, single parent families, and married couple families without children.

Some of the theoretical perspectives that have been useful in studying housework are more difficult to translate to gender differences in childcare . Childcare is more enjoyable and more intertwined with intergenerational investments that reproduce class status (Raley & Bianchi, 2006) . Hence, it can less often be assumed that mothers want to bargain out of rearing their children, or prioritize employment over housework (Raley, Bianchi, & Wang, 2012) . Mother’s more often want to control childrearing than housework, because of the ways childcare, but not housework, affirms maternal identities (Macdonald, 2010) . Qualitative evidence suggests that investing large amounts of time in childrearing goes to the very identity of being a good mother (Christopher, 2012; Hays, 1996) . Time-intensive childrearing is also one way parents can have more confidence in children’s intergenerational mobility (Lareau, 2003) . Hence, gender differences in childcare time, while gendered, also signal class-differentiated lifestyles (e.g., concerted cultivation versus natural growth) as much as or more than gender subordination.

Leisure differences between women and men support both time availability and gendered perspectives on time use. Women’s caregiving responsibilities are associated with a gender gap in leisure only among mothers who are employed full time and who are raising young children (Sayer et al., 2009) , as predicted by the time availability perspective. However, women’s leisure is of lower quality than comparable men; women more often combine leisure with household chores and minding children, and their leisure is also interrupted more by children than is men’s (Mattingly & Bianchi, 2003; Sayer, 2005) . These differences are associated with women experiencing leisure as less refreshing and higher levels of feeling rushed among women today compared with the mid-1970s (Craig & Mullan, 2013; Mattingly & Sayer, 2006) .

Data and Analytic Approach

I use respondent reported time diary data from five national US studies; the historical time diary collections fielded in 1965, 1975, 1985, and 1998, and the 2003/2004 and 2011/2012 American Time Use Study surveys. Interviews in all studies collected sociodemographic data and detailed information on all activities engaged in over a 24 h period.

The 1965 data are from the American’s Use of Time study , collected by the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan (Converse & Robinson, 1980) . This study was part of the 13 country 1965 Multinational Study of Time Use , which was the first systematic attempt to collect comparable cross-national data on time use patterns (Szalai, 1972) . The study had a response rate of 72 % for a sample size of 1241.

The 1975 data are from the first wave of the Time Use in Economic and Social Accounts Study, collected by the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan (Juster, Courant, Duncan, Robinson, & Stafford, 1979) . Both the 1985 and 1998 data were collected at the University of Maryland (Bianchi, Robinson, & Sayer, 2001; Converse & Robinson, 1980; Juster et al., 1979; Robinson & Godbey, 1999) . Each of the studies included a cross section of the US adult population. The response rate for the first wave of the 1975 study was 72 % (N = 1519), the 1985 study had a response rate of 51 % for the mailback subsample and 67 % for the telephone subsample (N = 5358, see below for information on the subsamples); and the 1998 study had a response rate of 56 % (N = 1151).

The other source of data is the 2003–2012 American Time Use Survey (ATUS; Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2014). This is the first federally administered time diary survey in the USA. Respondents aged 15 and over are drawn from the outgoing rotation of the Current Population Survey (CPS) and are representative of the American population. Because the ATUS sample is a subsample of the CPS, it has high-quality data on employment and education , and household and individual characteristics. Response rates range from 57.8 % in 2003 to the lowest response rate of 49.9 % in 2013 (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2014). In this analysis, I pool data from the 2003 and 2004 surveys and from the 2011 to 2012 collections; trends are similar when only 1 year is used for each time point as well as when additional years are pooled.

Time diary surveys conducted in the USA are similar in their objectives: to collect high-quality data on daily time patterns. They differ in sample design and survey administration; however, meaning the historical and contemporary data may not be strictly comparable in two ways. First, the 1965 study was limited to respondents aged 19–64 living in an urban family with at least one adult in the labor force (Converse & Robinson, 1980) . In contrast, the later collections were nationally representative studies of respondents aged 18 and older. Studies that have compared a subsample of the 1975 data that corresponds with 1965 sample restrictions indicate that trends are similar regardless of whether the 1975 subsample or the full 1975 sample is used for comparison (Bianchi et al., 2006; Sayer, 2005) . The 1965 sample characteristics also correspond with parent characteristics in the March 1965 CPS (Sayer, 2005). This indicates any trends between 1965 and 1975 are not simply artifacts of sample differences between the two studies. Second, the 1965 and 1975 studies were done in person and had higher response rates but did not cover the entire year. The 1985 collection was more complex in that it consisted of three subsamples: (1) one recruited by telephone with eligible respondents mailed a survey and questionnaire that they completed for the assigned day and then mailed back; (2) the second subsample was recruited and diary data was collected via telephone interviews; and (3) the third subsample was recruited via in-person interviews with diary data collected via pencil-and-paper diaries. Because this last subsample is neither comparable to the 1975 nor the 1998 studies, I exclude those respondents from this analysis. The 1998 and 2003–2012 studies were conducted via telephone interviews, and studies since 1985 have lower response rates compared with the earlier collections, but include diary days over an entire year (Sayer, Bianchi, & Robinson, 2004). However, despite these limits on comparability, sensitivity analyses (not shown) suggest that study design and sample differences are not systematically biasing the time use trends.

The analytic sample consists of 23,297 women and 18,683 men (see Table 2 for specific sample sizes at each time point). I exclude individuals who report a disability and those who are under age 25 or over 59. Individuals who are not in the 25–59 age range are more likely to be retired or full-time students and the time use patterns of individuals in these groups are distinct from those of working age adults. Weights are used in all analyses to correct for nonresponse and adjust for the ATUS oversample of weekend days. Sample characteristics are shown in Table 1.

Table 1 Sample characteristics by gender and survey
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Table 2 1965–2012 Trends and Gender Differences in Minutes per Day of Paid Work, Unpaid Work, Self Care, and Leisure
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A number of studies have established the accuracy and reliability of the time diary method (Juster, 1999; Juster, Ono, & Stafford, 2003; Marini & Shelton, 1993) . There are four approaches to collecting data on men’s and women’s time allocation: (1) stylized questions (e.g., questions that ask about how much time on average respondents spend in an activity over a set time period), (2) time diaries, (3) the experience sampling method (ESM), where respondents are contacted at a predetermined number of random intervals across the diary day, and (4) direct observation. The latter two methods may provide more accurate, objective reports of time use because they do not rely on the respondent’s memory of activities; however, both are used infrequently because of the large sample size required for ESM studies to yield generalizable results and the higher relative cost (Juster et al., 2003) . Consequently, stylized questions and time diaries are the more common methods for assessing time use (Juster, 1985) .

Time diaries are thought to be more accurate than stylized questions for three reasons. First, time diary surveys minimize reporting burden because respondents report time use in a way that is natural. In contrast, in surveys that use stylized questions, respondents are asked how much time they spend in an activity in a typical week, a block of time that is not a normal accounting time frame for most individuals. Second, time diary surveys minimize the possibility of respondents presenting themselves in a more socially desirable light; since to do so, they would have to fabricate the bulk of their day (Robinson & Godbey, 1999; Stinson, 1999). Finally, time diary surveys provide more accurate assessments of time allocations because activities are coded consistently across respondents. In contrast, activities considered work or leisure may vary from person to person in surveys using stylized questions.

Time diary data also have disadvantages. The ATUS does not collect data on simultaneous activities, meaning gender differences in multitasking cannot be examined in the USA. This is a particularly consequential omission for trend studies of gendered time use. Further, although the consistent coding of activities facilitates analysis of time in activities, the US coding typologies do not allow researchers to examine gender gaps in activities that may blend obligatory and discretionary time, such as eating (biologically necessary but may also be social) and outings with children (a blend of childcare and leisure). Additionally, all of the US time diary data are cross-sectional snapshots, preventing causal analyses of how transitions into and out of employment, marriage, and parental status affect daily time patterns. These shortcomings may understate gender differences in housework , childcare, and leisure time.

Time Use Measures

Time use estimates are constructed from the minutes per day reported in specific primary activities on the diary day, divided by 60 to convert minutes into hours per day. Activities are grouped into eight major categories: paid work, housework, childcare , care of adults, shopping and services, civic and religious activities, self-care , and leisure. Results for all categories are shown in Table 2; the analysis then focuses on housework, childcare, self-care (including sleep), and leisure, because these are activities that most respondents do on a regular basis, and they are also the domains most closely associated with historical differences in the division of labor and with well-being. Paid work is included in the descriptive tables to be able to present a complete snapshot of daily time allocations, but as gender differences in work hours are well-documented elsewhere, paid work is not the focus of this chapter .

Housework includes both daily time-consuming activities of cooking and cleaning (house cleaning, meal clean up, laundry, and ironing) and more infrequent discretionary activities (lawn care, outdoor chores, pet care, repairs and routine maintenance, bill paying, and household management). Household shopping and services (e.g., car repairs or going to the bank) are included in the shopping and services category because it is not possible to distinguish grocery shopping from other types of shopping, or determine housework-related services in the historical US time diary studies. The housework literature documents convincingly that core housework takes more time and is also more gendered (e.g., women do most of it) compared with more discretionary housework (Cooke & Baxter, 2010) .

Childcare is distinguished into two types of activities: daily and developmental. Daily physical care includes infant and toddler care (bathing, dressing, and feeding), general supervision of children aged five and over, medical care of children, making telephone calls about children, organizing care or events for children, interacting with childcare providers, and travel associated with childcare activities. Developmental activities include teaching children about an activity, playing with children, reading and helping children with homework or other tasks. Developmental childcare may signal parental time investments of greater quality or engagement and is also more discretionary, and perhaps more enjoyable for parents. Estimates of childcare do not include supervisory or “accessible” time when parents are available to children but not actively engaged with them and thus underestimate all parental time caring for children. The ATUS data include measures of the time parents have children “in their care,” but this measure is not comparable with earlier collections that include time in simultaneous activities, like making dinner and childcare (Bianchi et al., 2006) . Mothers spend more time than fathers supervising and being available to children, meaning the estimates here likely understate gender differences. Time in childcare activities is also limited to a specific set of childcare activities, instead of reflecting time with children in any activity .

Paid work consists of time at work, commuting time, income-generating activities such as making items for sale, and time in work-related activities, such as socializing with clients as part of one’s job. Time spent looking for a job is also included as paid work, as is time in classes that are taken for professional training or advancement. Note that individuals who are not employed per CPS definitions may still report time in paid work activities because of the inclusion of income-generating and job search activities.

Self-care includes time spent sleeping, eating, obtaining or performing health-related care, and using personal services (such as getting a haircut), personal or private activities (e.g., intimacy with a partner, using the toilet), and grooming. Because it is associated with healthy functioning, sleep is the primary focus of analyses of gender differences in time use .

Total leisure is constructed by summing minutes per day reported in social and recreational activities, exercise or sports, media use, and relaxing. Seven specific types of leisure activities were also constructed: television, cognitive, social, active, cultural, spectator, and relaxing activities. Television consists of minutes per day in passive screen time (watching traditional television or content on the web or an electronic device). Cognitive activities include taking classes, art, music, and performance activities, reading and writing for personal pleasure, and general web surfing for pleasure. Social activities include attending and hosting parties or receptions and general socializing and communicating with others. Active leisure includes sports, exercise, and recreational physical activities like swimming, bicycling, and hiking. Cultural leisure consists of going to museums, theater, or arts events. Spectator leisure includes attending sporting or entertainment events. Relaxing leisure is sedentary time in general relaxation, listening to music, and thinking. Respondents report little time on most leisure types aside from television; preliminary analyses also indicate substantial differences by gender in time spent watching television. Hence, although descriptive results are shown for each of the seven types of leisure , television is the focus .

The chapter first discusses trends in average minutes per day in aggregate and disaggregated types of paid work, housework, childcare, adult care, civic and religious activities, shopping and services, self-care , and leisure. This is done to provide a comprehensive assessment of how gender differences in all types of time use have changed between 1965 and 2013. The chapter then examines how education and family status are associated with gender differences in housework, childcare, sleep, all leisure, and television, and if associations have changed over time .

Trends and Gender Differences in Time use

Table 2 shows women’s and men’s 24 h time allocation across eight major types of activities: paid work, housework, childcare, adult care, civic and religious, shopping and services, self-care, and leisure . Specific activities, like cooking, daily childcare , sleep, and the disaggregated leisure categories (television, cognitive, social, active, cultural, spectator, and relaxing), are also shown because of the influence these activities have on economic and health outcomes and gender equality broadly. Women’s average minutes per day in each activity are shown in Panel A, men’s in Panel B, and the ratio of women’s to men’s time in Panel C.

The overall results suggest remarkable—and to gender scholars disquieting—stability in recent decades. The gender division of paid work, housework, and care work is markedly more similar in 2012 compared with 1965. However, much of this convergence took place by 1975, with smaller changes occurring between 1975 and 1985, and little change since 1985 in most types of time use . The stability in gendered time use patterns resembles the stall in employment trends and the emergence of ideologies of egalitarianism in opportunities coupled with ideologies that women and men are essentially different in their work/family ideals (Charles & Bradley, 2009; England, 2011) . The US data mirror trends in other English-speaking and Western and Eastern European countries (Man et al., 2011; Sayer, 2010) .

Looking first at paid work trends, women’s paid work increased about 2 h, from 2 h 12 min (hours, minutes) in 1965 to just under 4 h in 2012. In contrast, men’s paid work declined about an hour, falling from just under 7 h in 1965 to about 6 h in 2012. Most of this change happened prior to 1985. Only 19 min of women’s increased paid work and 12 min of men’s decreased paid work occurred between 1985 and 2012.

Nonetheless, women’s and men’s paid work time is much more similar today. In 1965, women did only 30 % as much paid work as men compared with 60 % as much in 1985 and 68 % as much in 2012. Further, the proportion of women reporting paid work activities on the diary day increased about 20 percentage points (32 % or women reported paid work in 1965 and 51 % in 2012, results not shown). More women engaging in paid work accounts for some of the increase in paid work hours , but work hours also rose by about an hour even when estimates are restricted to women reporting paid work activities. In contrast, fewer men reported paid work hours on the diary day after 1985 (78 % in 1965 compared with 66 % in 2012), and this decrease in men reporting employment accounts for all of the decline in men’s paid work time. Men reporting paid work activities indicated they spent about 8.5 h/day at each time point.

Turning to housework , Table 2 indicates that women’s housework dropped 1 h 45 min between 1965 and 2012, from 4 h to 2 h 21 min. Similar to paid work trends, only 19 min of the decrease occurred after 1985. The largest drop in women’s housework came between 1965 and 1975, when it declined from 4 h to 3 h 3 min. Declines are due not only to slightly fewer women reporting housework (88 % in 2012 compared with 96 % in 1965) but also less time spent doing housework among those reporting the activity. Trends in men’s housework are nonlinear, tripling between 1965 and 1998 (36 min to 1 h 40 min), but then decreasing about 20 min (1 h 23 min) by 2012. Significantly, more men report housework on the diary day: about 70 % since 1985 compared with 50 % in 1975 and 1965, but even among those reporting, trends are nonlinear. This suggests men’s inclination to do housework has increased, but time spent among those doing housework has not shifted as much, and has stalled or perhaps reversed. Gender differences in housework have diminished considerably, but more from women’s steep decline than from men’s increase. Women did 1.7 times men’s housework in 2012 compared with 6.8 times in 1965. This is progress but also suggests gender equality in housework remains more of a distant goal than everyday reality, particularly given the modest decline in men’s housework since the late 1990s.

Underscoring continued gender inequities in household labor are the higher ratios for core housework; women do 2.8 times more regular, daily housework than men, whereas the ratio is 0.7 for noncore housework (see Table 2). To highlight this pattern, Fig. 1 graphs gender differences in average daily minutes cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, and in noncore housework, like yard work and maintenance.

Fig. 1
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Gender differences and trends in housework

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In 2012, women did 2.4 times as much cooking (40 min compared with 16 min), 2.8 times as much cleaning (52 min compared with 19 min), and 4.1 times as much laundry as men (19 min compared with 5 min, respectively); declines from ratios of 14.1, 9.9, and 14.6, respectively, in 1965 (1985 ratios are 3.5, 4, and 7.4). Laundry continues to be the household task men are most resistant to performing (Bittman, Matheson, & Meagher, 1999; Twiggs, McQuillan, & Ferree, 1999) .

Gender differences in the ratio of women’s to men’s time in noncore housework flipped, however, going from women doing 1.3 times more in 1965 compared with only 70 % as much in 2012. However, the decline in the ratio comes entirely from men’s increased time in noncore activities, about 23 min compared with only a 2 min (nonsignificant) decline among women. At each time point, women reported about 30 min a day of nonroutine housework; men reported 20 min a day in 1965 and 43 min in 2012, with 18 min accounted for by lawn and pet care. The increase may come from the bigger lawns and houses today compared with earlier time periods.

Both core and noncore housework activities are likely a mix of work and pleasure. For example, some women and men may enjoy shopping in preparation for a home-cooked dinner; others (and perhaps the same individuals) may enjoy maintaining the lawn in putting green condition. However, the ability to schedule even those tasks one enjoys when it is most convenient, or when one enjoys them but is not obligated to do them, is consequential for gender equality (Bianchi et al., 2012; DeVault, 1991) . An overgrown, weedy yard may earn you a disparaging glance from the neighbors but is nonetheless easier to ignore for a few weeks than an overflowing sink full of dirty dishes, moldering produce, and a filthy bathroom. Some housework has to be done to meet daily needs for food, clean clothes, and maintain some level of domestic hygiene. Meals can be prepared with convenience products and/or supplied with take-out, but even these labor-saving strategies generate dirty dishes. Additionally, some types of housework cannot be outsourced, unless one has a live-in housekeeper—like tidying up the house at the end of the day, unloading the dishwasher, and putting household items away. The urgency and necessity of doing at least some housework oneself and cultural beliefs that encode these types of housework as women’s responsibilities as good wives and mothers are key factors underlying still large gender disparities in housework.

Paid work and housework trends among parents are similar to those for all women and men, with the caveat that the division of labor is more gendered among parents. For example, mothers do less paid work (a ratio of 0.57 in 2012) and more housework (a ratio of 1.9 in 2012) compared with fathers and compared with women who do not have children.

Figure 2 shows trends in mothers’ and fathers’ core and noncore housework, daily childcare and developmental childcare .

Fig. 2
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Trends in mothers’ & fathers’ housework and childcare

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In addition to doing substantially more core housework than fathers, mothers also do more childcare . Gaps have shrunk, but mothers continue to devote about twice as much time to childcare as fathers in 2012, with larger gender gaps in daily childcare time (a ratio of 2.04) than for developmental childcare (ratio of 1.46). However, unlike the downward trend in women’s housework and the more modest uptick in men’s housework that stalled in the mid-1980s, both mothers and fathers have steadily increased time investments in daily and developmental childcare , since 1975. Among mothers, childcare time declined significantly between 1965 and 1975, falling from 1 h 30 min to just over an hour (1 h 12 min). After no change in 1985, mothers’ childcare time rose 42 min to 1 h 42 min in 1998 to just under 2 h in 2004 and 2012. Fathers’ childcare was stable from 1965 to 1985, at about 20 min a day, before increasing 41 min by 2012.

Parents have increased time in both daily and developmental childcare activities since the 1970s, in part by reallocating time from housework to childcare (more so for mothers than fathers, as shown in Fig. 2). Mothers do about twice as much daily care as developmental care, but the proportion of mothers reporting developmental activities on the diary day increased 15 percentage points (27 % in 1975 to 42 % in 2012, results not shown). Among those reporting developmental childcare , the average time investments just about doubled, from 56 to 93 min over the same period.

Fathers’ time is more evenly split between daily and developmental childcare time, but they too spend more time in daily care (17 min for daily and 5 min for developmental in 1975, compared with 34 and 21 min in 2012). Additionally, in 2012, 44 % of fathers reported daily care on the diary day compared with 32 % in 1975; comparable estimates for developmental care are 27 and 20 %. Hence, a larger proportion of fathers’ increased childcare investments are directed toward daily childcare today than in the 1960s. This suggests that fathers are not concentrating increased childcare time to a select group of activities (e.g., those that are more fun or rewarding) but instead are substantially more involved with the day-to-day care of their children. More of fathers’ time caring for children is done with the mother present, whereas mothers are more likely to do childcare activities of all types with only the child present (Craig & Mullan, 2011) . Less is known about how parents interpret solo and shared parenting vis-à-vis equity in the division of labor. More solo childcare time among mothers could signal persistent gender disparities in associations of care of children with parental identities and feelings of primary responsibility for children. Nonetheless, although mothers continue to do twice as much childcare as fathers, the trend data suggest childcare is one arena in which progress toward a less gendered division of labor has inched forward.

The data shown in Table 2 and Figs. 1 and 2 are not adjusted for employment, educational, and family status differences, key factors that influence time use . Tables 3 (all women and men) and 4 (mothers and fathers) present regression-adjusted means for housework and childcare . (Trends in sleep, leisure, and television are discussed below.)

Table 3 Regression adjusted means of women’s and men’s minutes per day of housework, sleep, and leisure
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Table 4 Regression adjusted means of mothers’ and fathers’ minutes per day of housework, childcare, sleep, and leisure
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Accounting for higher proportions of women who are not employed or work fewer hours than men (either in part-time employment or shorter weekly work hours among full-time women workers) reduces gender differences in housework, as shown in Fig. 3 (predicted housework trends by gender and employment status).

Fig. 3
figure 3

Predicted housework trends by gender and employment

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As predicted by the time availability hypothesis, individuals who devote more time to paid work have less time available for housework. The negative association of employment hours and housework time is clearly evident in Fig. 3. Employment hours have a sharper negative association with women’s housework, because of gendered reasons for nonemployment and the gendered symbolic meaning of housework. Women’s family responsibilities are more often the reason they are not employed, whereas men are more likely to be nonemployed because of health or disability factors that limit their ability to engage in paid work. These same factors likely reduce their ability to engage in (much) housework. The symbolic encoding of housework as feminine also may deter men who are not fulfilling expectations of hegemonic masculinity that require successful performance of breadwinning from engaging in too much housework, whereas it reinforces cultural beliefs that housework is women’s work, regardless of employment status.

Figure 3 also indicates that housework differences have narrowed for women and men in all employment statuses, but the gender gap has declined more among women and men employed full-time. For example, gender gaps in housework among full-time employed women and men in 1965 were about 2.5 h (183 min for women and 35 min for men), whereas the gender gap was only 35 min in 2012 (109 min for women and 74 min for men). Among women and men who were not employed at each time point, the gender gap in housework was just over 3 h in 1965 and just over 1 h in 2012. Regardless of employment status, however, the increase in men’s housework time stalled in 1985: men who were not employed reported 74 min of housework in 1985 and 2012; those who were employed full-time reported 125 min of housework at both time points. Women too shed housework regardless of employment status, and most of the decline occurred prior to 1985.

Figure 4 shows similar negative associations of employment with childcare : employed mothers and fathers report less time in childcare at each time point than those who are not employed or employed part-time.

Fig. 4
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Parents’ childcare trends by employment

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For example, in 2012 fathers who are employed full-time report 61 min of childcare, compared with 104 min among fathers who are not employed. Comparable comparisons for mothers are 85 min among those employed full-time and 153 min among mothers who are not employed. Gender differences in childcare time are smaller for parents who are employed full-time at each time, and there is some suggestion in Fig. 4 that gaps may have widened since the mid-1980s. In 1965 and 1975, the gap in full-time employed mother’s and father’s childcare was about 10 min a day, a difference that is not significant, whereas in 2012, the gender gap in childcare was about 25 min. Childcare increased among parents in all employment statuses, and increases were sharper for all groups since the mid-1980s. This suggests widespread behavioral changes among mothers and fathers, perhaps triggered by the emergence of norms of intensive mothering and involved fatherhood . This interpretation is supported by detailed analyses of trends in childcare in the USA and Europe (Bianchi et al., 2006; Gauthier, Smeeding, & Furstenberg, 2004) .

Having a college education and marital and parental status are the other major influences on housework and childcare . Figure 5 shows the 1965–2012 trend in women’s and men’s housework time by college education . Women with a college degree do less housework at each time point, but housework has declined for women with and without a college degree. More-educated women are more egalitarian than less-educated women, are more likely to be employed, and with the bifurcation of employment hours, are more likely to work in relatively longer hour jobs (Cohen, 2014) . Both factors work to reduce time investments in housework, as shown in Fig. 5. However, the negative influence of college on women’s housework hours has attenuated over time. College-educated women’s housework was 23 min lower than less-educated women’s housework in 1965, but only 10 min lower in 2012. This is a much smaller difference than the 1 h decline from 1965 to 2012 observed for women with and without a college degree.

Fig. 5
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Predicted Housework trends by gender and college

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Among men, Fig. 5 shows a similar nonlinear trend in housework among college-educated and less-educated men; for both, housework increased from 1965 to 1998, and then decreased modestly. Theoretically, college-educated men are more egalitarian compared with less-educated men and thus should do more housework. However, differences in men’s housework by education are not significant. Hence, results point to widespread behavioral change among women and men, regardless of educational status, that worked to decrease women’s but increase men’s housework.

College more sharply differentiates mothers’ and fathers’ childcare time, as shown in Fig. 6. Parents with a college education do more childcare compared to those without a college education. Results are similar comparing parents with less than high school, high school degree, and some college, suggesting additional years of education are positively associated with childcare time , but a college degree is particularly influential.

Fig. 6
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Parents’ childcare trends by college

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Figure 6 reveals two key findings. First, the positive influence of college on parent’s time in childcare activities intensified between 1965 and 1998, but has remained stable since then. Gaps between college-educated and noncollege-educated parent’s childcare time have doubled, consistent with other research documenting class differences in parenting behaviors (Lareau, 2003) . In 1965, college-educated mothers reported about 20 more minutes in childcare than mothers without a college education ; in 2012, the difference was over 40 min a day. Among fathers, those with a college education did 16 more minutes of childcare in 1965 and just under 30 min in 2012. Hence, the rate of positive increase in childcare time is stronger among college-educated than noncollege-educated parents.

Second, gender gaps in childcare time are similar comparing women and men by education level. College increases mothers’ and fathers’ childcare time, but it does not shrink the gender gap in care. Between 1965 and 1985, both college- and noncollege-educated mothers did about three times as much childcare as comparable fathers, whereas after 1985, mothers of all educational statuses do about twice as much childcare as comparable fathers.

Moving back to the descriptive data shown in Table 2, we see that adult care, civic and religious activities, and shopping and services—all activities bundled under the broad category of committed time or unpaid work in conventional time diary typologies—reveal three things. First, as anticipated, few women and men report adult care and civic/religious activities on the diary day. These activities are engaged in by fewer adults, are done every day by a more select group of adults, and thus they are more likely to be “missed” by the one-day snapshot method of the US time diaries. For example, even with the large sample sizes of the ATUS, in 2012, only 12 % of women and 11 % of men reported adult-care activities. Second, gender differences in these activities are modest, counter to findings in the literature that women engage in helping and volunteering more than men (Wilson & Musick, 1997) . Differences between the ATUS data and other surveys could be due to the smaller precision in time diary studies of time in activities that occur on a less regular basis. Last, because coding differences between the historical and contemporary time diary data do not allow researchers to distinguish necessary shopping from discretionary shopping, it is more complicated to interpret the meaning of gender differences in shopping. The trend data shown in Table 2 indicate that women spend more time shopping and obtaining services (an hour a day compared with between 30–50 min among men). Analyses of the ATUS data not shown indicate women spend more time in both grocery shopping and in services, but more research is needed on factors associated with this difference, as well as research on whether shopping and services are related to gender inequality in the same ways gender influences other types of household work, and how women and men make sense of their time in grocery shopping versus other types of shopping.

Looking next at gender differences in self-care , time diary data in Table 2 show no significant trend or gender differences. Women and men report about 10 h 30 min sleeping, eating, and in other types of personal care. Sleep accounts for about 8 of these 10 h at each time point, counter to contemporary popular narratives about sleep-deprived adults. Additionally, results adjusted for employment status, age group, education, and marital and parental status shown in Tables 3 (all women and men), 4 (parents), and 5 (women and men by college and family status) reveal no gender disparities or significant trends in self-care . Results not shown indicate nonemployed and part-time employed women and men devote significantly more time to sleep compared with those who are employed full-time. It is likely disability status or health issues account both for higher sleep time and being employed less than full-time. Similar results are found when comparisons are limited to parents. Studies that have examined the quality of sleep indicate women’s sleep is more often disturbed by partners or children and that feelings of stress from too much work and too little time may negatively affect sleep quality more strongly among women than men (Burgard & Ailshire, 2013; Maume, Sebastian, & Bardo, 2010) . Gendered sleep inequities may thus be reflected more in sleep quality than quantity.

Table 5 Adjusted means of women’s and men’s minutes per day in childcare, housework, sleep, leisure, and television by family status and college degree, 1985–2014
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Gender differences and trends in leisure also do not correspond with popular narratives of 24/7 demands. Unadjusted estimates shown in Table 2 indicate women’s leisure declined about 30 min between 1965 and 1998, but then increased to about 4 h 22 min in 2012, not significantly different than the 1965 estimate of 4 h 32 min. Men’s leisure did not change significantly, accounting for 4 h 26 min in 1965 and 4 h 49 min in 2012. However, estimates in Tables 2 and 3 do show a gender leisure gap of about 30 min. Adjusting for employment, education , family status, and age increases the gender leisure gap to about an hour (253 min for women compared with 306 min for men, see Table 3). Comparing leisure time in Tables 3 and 4 shows that parents have less leisure than nonparents but the size of the gender gap is quite similar.

Scholars have interpreted the gender gap in leisure as an emerging indicator of the evolving and resilient ways the gender division of labor remained a linchpin of gender inequality (Sayer 2005) . Disaggregating leisure into categories that reflect distinct opportunities and contexts for social integration and enhancement of physical and cognitive capabilities afford a more nuanced lens on whether the gender gap in leisure is disadvantageous to women. Tables 2, 3, and 4 indicate gender differences in television time account for over half of the gender gap in leisure. Men spend more daily time watching television compared with women, although the gap has decreased over time. In 1965, the gender gap in television time was 70 min, with men’s 141 min double women’s 70 min; in 2012, the gap was 34 min because of larger increases in television time among women than men. Table 4 shows that television time among fathers remained stable, at about 145 min a day, whereas mothers increased television time by about 30 min to 109 min in 2012.

Gender differences and trends in cognitive, social, active, cultural, and spectator leisure shown in Table 2 and Fig. 7 underscore that the television time accounts for the gender gap in leisure. Gender differences in other types of leisure are either insignificant or modest.

Fig. 7
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Trends in leisure by gender

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Women report slightly less time in active leisure and relaxing, and slightly more time socializing, compared with men. Women’s lower time in active leisure is consistent with studies using self-reported long-term time in exercise and sports. These studies attribute differences to gendered caregiving responsibilities that reduce available time or restrict mobility more sharply for women than men (Bird & Rieker, 2008; Nomaguchi & Bianchi, 2004) . Larger friendship networks and greater emphasis in women’s friendships on talking and sharing may account for the gender difference in socializing. The data also indicate that substantially less time is allocated to these types of leisure than to television. One reason is the lower regular frequency with which women and men engage in these types of leisure. Socializing with others, and attending cultural and spectator events, requires schedule coordination, some travel, and in many cases, money.

Multivariate analyses support the descriptive gender differences and trends. The adjusted means shown in Tables 3 and 4 indicate that employment, education , and family status have similar influences on women’s and men’s leisure time. College-educated individuals watch less television and engage in more active leisure; employed individuals have less time available for leisure and spend less of that time watching television. Parents have less leisure and spend less time watching television compared to women and men without children. Age differences are modest for both gender differences and differences over time.

Discussion

In sum, the time diary data on gendered time use support two of the most consistent findings from earlier analyses. First, women and men spend time in more similar ways today compared with the 1960s and 1970s. Second, this is because women have changed their daily time use patterns more substantially than men have changed theirs. The high-quality, large-sample, representative findings from the 2003 to 2012 ATUS data reinforce the large body of work documenting these differences. The new finding from this analysis is that about half of the gender gap in leisure time is accounted for by television. One possible interpretation of the gender gap in leisure is that men’s protection of leisure time signals greater privilege and power regardless of how they spend their leisure time. The idea is that men are able to watch more television, perhaps because they enjoy it, and the reason men are able to exercise greater preference in their time use choices is because they have higher relative resources and/or power than women. This interpretation frames the gender gap as a story of women’s disadvantage. However, another possible interpretation is that men watch more television because they are more socially isolated. The idea here is that employment and family roles connect individuals to others in society. Women have added employment roles to family roles, and more women than men are raising children as single adults. Women’s friendship networks are also more expansive and enduring compared with men’s. Hence, women are more anchored to both family and employment today than historically, whereas men’s connection to families outside of a married partnership is more tenuous. Men may devote a greater share and more time to television because this type of leisure does not require social integration. This framing presents the gender gap in leisure more in terms of men’s disadvantage.

This analysis updates trends from 1965 through 2012 and documents remarkable stability in time use patterns over the past 30 years. This period is characterized by women outpacing men in earning college degrees, growing acceptance of married mothers’ employment combined with mothers reducing time out of the labor force for caregiving, and growth in the number of single parent and dual earner families, and single-person households. Theoretically, considering these factors in isolation, each should have worked to further reduce gender differences in time use, because women and men allocate time in more similar ways when they are single, when they are not raising children, and when they have similar resources from education and employment. Over the period, however, associations between having a college degree, and entry into marriage and parenthood within marriage, as well as having a stable job with reasonable pay and benefits, strengthened (Cohen, 2014) . Families today have “diverging destinies”; women and men with a college degree are more likely to get married and remain married, and to have children within marriage, compared with less-educated individuals. These factors affect time availability and resources, but it is an open question how they affect time use patterns.

This possibility is examined in Table 5 that shows the joint influences of college degree and family status on women’s and men’s housework, childcare , sleep, and leisure , with television broken out from other types of leisure . Four family statuses are shown: single, no children; married, no children; single parents; and married parents. Data are shown only for 1985, 2004, and 2012 because the proportion of single parents is too small in the 1965, 1975, and 1998 studies to produce reliable estimates.

The bottom line revealed from Table 5 is that the story remains basically the same, but with some interesting twists. Women’s housework declined more substantially among married women without children and married mothers compared with single women without children and single mothers. Further, this is the case for women with and without a college degree. For example, married mothers with less than a college degree reduced housework by about 30 min; not significantly different than the decrease seen for those with a college degree. In contrast, single mothers’ housework is about 2 h 20 min for those without a college degree and about 2 h for those with a college degree at each time point. Women of all family status types who have a college degree may be less inclined to do housework, and those with a college degree and in a heterosexual partnership may have resources available to outsource some housework. Both compositional differences (the increase in women living alone, the declining number of years spent married and caring for young children, and increased education and employment rates) and behavioral differences account for women’s decreased housework. However, influences of gender socialization and perhaps higher standards for meals and cleanliness are also evident in Table 5. Single women without children do less housework than other women, but they also do about 1.5 times as much housework as single men. The gender gap in housework is smaller when comparing single women and men, and largest among married parents (at 1.9), but even the most similar women and men invest different amounts of time in housework (results not shown indicate similar results comparing women and men by employment status, and women and men in the same age group).

Additionally, Table 5 shows the increase in men’s housework is concentrated among single fathers. Single men and married men with no children, regardless of education, and married men with less than a college degree did not increase housework significantly. College-educated married men decreased time in housework, albeit joint comparisons of year, college, and family status trends are not significant for any group of men. Results speak to the limited understanding of factors that influence men’s housework time and the complicated causal links between gendered social roles of parent, spouse, and worker and housework time. Like mothers, fathers may have opted out of housework to concentrate available unpaid work time in childcare.

Trend data in childcare by education and family status reveal few new insights. College-educated mothers and fathers in single and married parent families allocate more time to childcare activities, but all parents increased childcare time between 1985 and 2012. Comparisons of the 2004 and 2012 data also suggest that only married fathers with less than a college degree continued to increase childcare time after 2004. This could be due to influences of the recession or class-differentiated ideals of fathering that emphasize daily, private care of children among working-class men and public displays of involved fathering at children’s activities among college-educated men (Shows & Gerstel, 2009; Smith & Mattingly, 2012) .

Overall, data shown in Table 5 suggests marriage and parenthood widen gender gaps in time use for college and less than college-educated women and men. The cross-sectional trend data provide only a series of snapshots, but this interpretation is supported by European studies of longitudinal panel data (Grunow et al., 2012). Regardless of education , single women and men with no children, married women and men with no children, and single parents have similar levels of sleep, and among those who are single with no children, similar levels of leisure . However, married women with no children and single mothers have only about 90 % as much leisure as comparable men, and married mothers have only 85 % as much leisure as married fathers. Gender gaps in leisure have increased over time, but the majority of the leisure gap is due to men’s higher levels of television, and a smaller portion to women’s higher levels of socializing. Socializing with others may strengthen social network ties and be experienced as more relaxing than watching television. Even among college-educated single women and men with no children, men spend about 40 min more each day watching television. The only group of women who watch more television than comparable men are married women without a college degree, who in 2012 report about 20 min more television time than married men without a college degree.

What the gender, family status, and education differences in television time signal for gender equality is not so obvious. As noted earlier, the gender differences could signal continued male prerogative to protect leisure time from housework and childcare obligations. It could signal the ways television is easy leisure to do at the end of an exhausting work day, the ubiquity of television across contexts, and way sports interest and knowledge signal masculinity, or the relatively inexpensive nature of television. It could also signal social isolation from relationships and public spaces. Table 5 suggests combinations of these explanations may hold and underscore the need for mixed method approaches to understanding gender differences in leisure.

Inertia in the gender revolution has been explained by the myriad of gendered incentives that push women into societally valued “masculine” activities, like paid work, and pull men away from societally devalued “feminine” activities, like carework (England 2011) . Among young adults, shared work and family roles are desired by most but “fallback” positions differ by gender, with women opting into self-reliant lives as singles and men opting into neo-traditional arrangements of combined work and family roles for women but not men (Gerson, 2010) . Until the circuits between extrafamilial gendered institutions and the gendered nature of marriage and parenting change, gender is likely to remain the most potent determinant of not just who’s doing the housework but also who’s watching the television.