Time Allocation, “Work,” and “Household Activities”

Here‘s this really interesting interactive graph from the NY Times, which purports to show how different demographics spend their time.

What’s interesting for feminists is the extent to which women spend less time on “work” and more time on “household activities.”   I wonder how many of those “household activities” would be labelled as work by the (mostly) women who perform them.     The graph reveals the persistence of crucial misunderstandings about what constitutes work and who performs it.   This misunderstandings create huge distortions in public policy that favor benefits and recognition for those in the “public” workforce to the exclusion of those (mostly women) who do other kinds of work (housekeeping, child rearing, charity work, etc.).

-Darren Rosenblum