Chapter 3The UK in Cross-national Context
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Jonathan Gershuny
Kimberly Fisher
Is the UK population unusual in the way it uses its time? Can we draw conclusions from the analyses using UK data presented in this book to make wider inferences about changes in the daily lives of people in other, similar countries? We might think that we know roughly what the differences are between the UK and other countries in the time that we spend in paid work, in leisure time, or in housework, but how much of what we think we know is based on fact, rather than on assumptions (or, even, simple prejudice)? Here, we take a brief ‘time out’ from our UK narrative to fit UK daily-time use into the wider international picture. The following sections of this book delve deeper into some of the issues raised in the previous two chapters in relation to the UK historical sequence of time-use diary surveys. Here we present some snapshots of where the Great Day of the UK stands in relation to other similar countries in the necessary, committed, contractual and discretionary activities introduced in the previous chapter.
Alongside the UK data collection, the Centre for Time Use Research (CTUR) has brought together detailed diary descriptions of more than one million days, in around 90 different time-use surveys from 25 other countries into the Multinational Time Use Study (MTUS). We have reorganized and harmonized these as far as we are able, to make them internationally comparable. In the following pages, the diary collections from a sample of a dozen of these countries – chosen because they provide a reasonably long-term historical picture of change across a wide variety of developed societies – are used to provide an international context for UK patterns and trends in the use of time. A range of quite different countries are featured, though all are relatively wealthy. Two large Anglophone nations are included, the USA and Australia, in addition to the UK. There are three mid-continental European countries: France, Germany and the Netherlands; three Scandinavian countries: Denmark, Finland and Norway; three southern European countries: Spain, Portugal and Italy; and (for the moment) a sole representative of the ex-COMECON developed nations, Slovenia. Because some of the earlier samples have somewhat restricted age ranges – and also to avoid the complications imposed by the general ageing of population structures – all the graphs in this section are based on populations aged 20–60.
Necessary, committed, contracted and discretionary activities across countries
We saw in the UK case in Chapter 2 that the expected recent decline in sleep time, predicted by some on the basis of the ‘24/7 society’, simply did not happen. This also seems to be the case for the other dozen countries of our analysis. Figure 3.1 shows sleep time for all 13 countries (the UK and the 12 comparator countries). Sleep represents the largest component of the time necessary for human functioning (in fact, sleep time is described by the diarists as time spent in bed for naps or the night’s sleep). There are some apparent sharp declines in sleep times for the first decade for which we have evidence (the 1960s). French men and women, for example, apparently reduced their sleep time by an average of 20 or 25 minutes between the 1960s and 1970s. But the surveys these estimates are based on have reached us with only rather limited documentation and we are uncertain whether this apparent change reflects real shifts in time use or, alternatively, differences in the way some activities are classified.1
By contrast, the evidence from the 1980s onwards in most of the other countries, as in the UK, suggests that sleep time has remained rather constant, or has been somewhat increasing. For these more recent decades, and for most of the surveys covered, we have quite high-quality documentation and are more certain of how the activity categorizations have been made. The UK shows a particularly large dip in sleep time from the 1970s to the 1980s that might reflect some problems related to the selection of the 1980s UK sample. But if we ignore this and look just at the 1970s, 2000s and 2015 time points in the UK, we see a gentle rise; for men from 487 minutes to 504 minutes, for women from 500 to 513 minutes. The changes seen during the last decade and a half are barely statistically significant. And this UK trajectory is similar to that of most other countries: generally, constant or gently rising sleep time over recent decades.
In absolute terms, time in bed for the Danish population seems to lie a clear 10 (for women) and 20 (for men) minutes below that for all the other countries. We have no explanation for this, but suspect it may be an as-yet-undetected difference in the procedures used for coding the diaries. But, generally, the range of national mean sleep times lie within a remarkably narrow band, between 480 and 510 minutes on average, and country by country remains relatively constant, with overall changes (mostly increases) of no more than 10 or 20 minutes.
One striking regularity emerges when we compare the two sub-panels of Figure 3.1, for men and women respectively. It appears that women, across our multinational samples, have just a little more sleep time than do men. Women have less sleep than men in only three of the 48 surveys in our 13-country comparison. Women’s sleep advantage over men is small but regular – ranging from 1 per cent to 5 per cent. This persistent gender difference in sleep time is only observable by comparing historical diary studies and is essentially impossible to detect except with a large collection of time-use studies of this kind.
As far as we know, this result has not been previously identified. The small size of the margin, compared with its very high level of persistence, suggests that it is unlikely to reflect a general sociological cause such as women focusing more on the domestic sphere as compared to men. If this were the explanation, we would expect to see more variation in the scale, reflecting other intervening national differences in, for example, the proportion of women in employment – or indeed systematic national differences in the way men and women report their sleep time. Could there be a physiological explanation, an underlying genetically determined requirement for sleep, producing an approximately constant requirement for sleep, with a small but regular addition associated with being female?
Necessary time: sleep in 13 countries
Time spent in personal care and eating time at home (the other components of ‘necessary’ time)2 shows a similarly regular pattern of advantage to women, again with only three exceptions across the 48 surveys (not shown). But in this case the scale of the difference is rather larger, and the range of women’s margin over men is much more variable, ranging up to 15 per cent in Finland in the late 1990s and 12 per cent in both the UK and the US in the 2010s. Overall, time devoted to this pair of activities has either remained roughly constant or somewhat declined (at around 2 hours per day for men, 2 hours and 30 minutes for women). Given that in most countries, as in the UK, time spent eating at home has declined substantially over this period for both men and women, women’s additional margin of time in this activity clearly relates to personal care (bathing, dressing, personal toilet): in this case the gender difference is more likely to be related to a sociological rather than a physiological explanation.
Altogether the most remarkable long-term change in time use, in the UK and the 12 comparator countries alike, is in the ‘committed’ time represented by the ‘general housework’ category (cooking, cleaning and household maintenance), as shown in Figure 3.2. Women in the UK and the US – the countries with the longest historical series of time-use surveys – spent on average 1 hour and 30 minutes or 2 hours per day less time doing this type of work over the past half-century, while other countries show a similar rate of change over a shorter window of observation. Women in the UK appear to lie quite squarely in the middle of the pack in this respect.
One thing that patently does not explain the reduction in women’s general housework time is men’s general housework time. This rises in almost all countries over the period, and more than doubles in some. But it starts from a much lower level, with the reduction in women’s housework occurring at two or three times the rate of the increase in men’s housework. So, while it is the case that the gender balance of general housework has become less unequal, women still do in general twice as much or more of this work than men do. Noteworthy in this is the case of Italy, in which (in the most recent survey currently available to us) women still spend almost four times longer per day doing general housework than men.
Committed time: unpaid cooking and cleaning and other domestic activity
Of course, there is more to the committed time category of activities than general housework activities. The largest additional element is care-type activities, mostly involving care for children, but also including care for adults. These activities take up 30 to 50 minutes per day for men, and 60 to 90 minutes per day for women. But since barely half of all households include people to care for, men and women in those households that do any caring spend around twice as long doing it as these averages suggest. Figure 3.3 shows the ratio of women’s to men’s time spent in care work. Again, we see some decrease in most countries in the proportion done by women over the past half-century, with the UK roughly positioned in mid-table, both in terms of level and of rate of decline.
The final large category of committed time is shopping, involving 20 to 25 minutes per day for men, and 30 to 35 minutes per day for women, but in this case (unlike for care time) it is an activity done by almost all households. As for care time, in the women to men ratios shown in Figure 3.4 we see some gender convergence, with, in most countries, women’s proportional contribution declining to around 50 per cent higher than men’s. Here again, with a women/men shopping time ratio of 1.5, the UK is placed pretty much in the centre of the group of comparator countries.
Women/men ratio in child and adult care
Women/men ratio in shopping time
To sum up, although all three of the broad categories of committed time show gender convergence, all three still also display a substantial remaining gender disparity, with men doing, overall, much less unpaid work than women.
Figure 3.5 shows the changing totals of paid work for men and women (it also incorporates time in education, to take account of the enormous growth of higher education in most of these countries over the 55-year period). Trends in paid work time by gender to some extent present the mirror image of the trends in general housework time shown in Figure 3.2 (although this isn’t entirely so because, while time spent in general housework is by far the largest component of women’s unpaid labour time, the same is not the case for men, for whom shopping and caring time represents a much larger proportion of unpaid work time).
We again see a quite striking consistency between the UK and the 12 comparators in Figure 3.5. This is upset, once again, by the mid-1980s UK sample – without which we would find a smoothly declining total for men’s paid work among 12 of our 13 countries: from around 400 to 450 minutes per day of paid work in the 1960s to around 300 minutes paid work per day in the 2010s, with UK men located pretty well in the middle of the group. (We might alternatively consider that the UK men’s paid work estimate in the mid-1980s is rather similar to that of the Netherlands, and that subsequently men’s paid work time in the Netherlands quite closely tracks that of the UK.) Nevertheless, the general story for men’s paid work is quite clear: a slow general decline in average work time, of perhaps 20 minutes per decade. Women’s paid work time by contrast (and with the singular exception of Portugal) either rises, or remains relatively steady. Women in the Netherlands, virtually all outside the paid labour force at the start, are now almost exactly converged with UK women’s employment levels (and with a similar prevalence of part-time work). Again, the UK finds itself pretty much in the middle of the comparator countries.
Contracted time: average minutes per day in paid work or full-time education
Figure 3.6 adds together all the leisure and consumption activities to display trends in ‘discretionary’ or ‘uncommitted’ time. It shows a surprisingly tightly bunched plot of leisure trends across the 13 country samples. With the exception of Australia, which (for reasons we still do not fully understand) shows an overall decline in leisure time since the 1990s, we see a reasonably straightforward pattern of gender convergence, at around 400 and 350 minutes per day for men and women (who are part compensated by extra time spent in sleep and in personal care) respectively. The overall trend resembles not so much an inverted-U shape, as a shallow inverted J-shape. It appears that leisure and consumption time – the residual once ‘necessary, committed and contracted’ time has been accounted for – was generally increasing from the 1960s to the 1980s. But over the following 30 years leisure time seemed to stabilize, or even gently decrease. The UK has a relatively high level of leisure time, but its total has also been falling slowly since the mid-1980s. So we get back, finally, to the issue we raised in the introductory section to this book: is there any evidence at all that we are moving towards a society of leisure?
Discretionary time: average minutes per day in all leisure and consumption
Summarizing the Great Day
Here we can take full advantage of the ‘adding up to 24 hours’ characteristic of time-use data representing the population’s Great Day. We have discussed the evolution of sleep and personal care. We have discussed paid and unpaid work. We have discussed leisure and necessary personal care. We can bring all these different sorts of time together into a single analysis, in the form of a ‘life-balance triangle’ graph. Figure 3.7, showing the central part of this triangle, plots paid work, unpaid work and non-work time into the two dimensions of the graph. Twenty-six trend lines, each representing the time trend for men or women from each of our 13 countries, are plotted on to the graph. In the vertical dimension, up and down the page, we have the split between work and non-work time (non-work time is calculated by adding together sleep and personal care, and all leisure time), expressed as a ratio of all time. The further up the vertical dimension, the greater is the proportion of the Great Day spent in non-work, as opposed to work. The horizontal axis of the triangle is calculated as the ratio of paid work to the total of paid plus unpaid work. The further along the horizontal axis, the greater the proportion of paid work time, as opposed to unpaid work time. To avoid confusion in the graph, only the first and last survey data points for each country are plotted.
Firstly, we see two distinct clusters of lines, one on either side of the 0.5 vertical dimension running up the centre of the graph (indicating the proportion of all work time spent in paid work). To the left are the lines for women, and to the right those for men. This simply reflects the fact that, on average, men do mostly paid work, and women mostly unpaid. Second, we can see that both groups of lines lie roughly between the 0.6 and 0.7 level of the vertical non-work as opposed to work proportion – which corresponds nicely to the expectation that the Great Day should be divided roughly equally between work, leisure and rest, with the slight emphasis on leisure and rest (including sleep, of course). Third, the men’s and women’s lines are approximately at the same level on the vertical axis – with the men marginally higher, indicating a slightly higher average of leisure and rest time.
Less work time (mostly) and more gender equality
Of the 26 arrow-lines, 23 indicate movement towards lower levels of gender segregation in overall work patterns. Twelve of the 13 lines for men indicate movement from higher proportions of paid work towards lower – i.e. moving to the left of their initial positions (the exception here is the Netherlands). Similarly, 11 of the 13 women’s arrow-lines indicate movement to the right away from unpaid work in the direction of a higher proportion of paid work – the exceptions here being Portugal and Finland, both of which show small shifts towards unpaid work. The intermediate survey points in the data series, not plotted in Figure 3.7, do not change this account in any substantial way.
Movements in the vertical, work/non-work, dimension are more divided. Nine of the 13 men’s, and (from the same countries) nine of the 13 women’s arrow-lines move upwards from the base of the triangle, indicating a reduction in overall work time. And, given that we saw only small changes in the totals of sleeping, eating and personal care in Figures 3.1–3, this indicates a general increase in leisure time. The four exceptions are Netherlands, Spain, Denmark and Australia, all of which experienced a decrease of non-work (leisure and rest) time.
In the case of the work/non-work distinction, when we include all the intermediate observations between the earliest and the latest survey dates, we see reversals in the directions of change, with sometimes larger, sometimes smaller, proportions of time spent in work – not apparent in the simple plot shown in Figure 3.7. So, while the first of the two trends – the reduction in the gender segregation of paid and unpaid work (horizontal dimension) – is a strong regularity, the trend towards a reduction in the overall proportion of work is less convincing (vertical dimension).
Finally, compare the arrowheads for women and men for each country. These mark the data point for the most recent survey for each country. For every country except Denmark and the Netherlands, the men’s arrowheads are higher than the women’s, indicating an overall advantage in access to leisure and rest for men over women. In most cases this advantage is not all that large, a matter of one or two percentage points. But we should take note of Italy, where the difference is something like 5 per cent, and Spain, where the difference is around 4 per cent. In these cases, the excess of total work for women is still a significant reality. But arguably, even in these cases, the division of work and non-work time is perhaps not the most important issue. Compare the gender differences for each country in the up–down dimension, with the large gap between women and men on the left–right dimension. The latter measures the relative degree of engagement of men and women in paid work time, or the money economy. The wider the left–right gap, the higher on average is men’s paid work experience relative to women’s. Pay and promotions are both to a considerable degree determined by work experience. So, even where the vertical difference in the total of work time compared to non-work time is small, the wider the horizontal distance between men and women in any given country the higher we might expect the gender wage gap there to be. Once the ‘vertical’ difference between men’s and women’s overall work time has dwindled, this horizontal difference in the paid/unpaid work balance becomes the central key issue for gender equality.