Eine Metastudie behandelt die Frage, wie viel Männer und Frauen insgesamt arbeiten:
Time-diary data from 27 countries show a negative relationship between real GDP per capita and female-male differences in total work time—work for pay and work at home. In rich non-Catholic countries on four continents men and women do about the same average amount of total work. Survey results demonstrate, however, that labor economists, macroeconomists, sociologists and the general public believe that women work more. The widespread average equality does not arise from gender differences in the price of time, from intra-family bargaining or from spousal complementarity. Several theories, including ones based on social norms, might explain these findings and are consistent with cross-national evidence from the World Values Surveys and sets of microeconomic data from Australia and Germany.
Quelle: Total Work and Gender
Frauen und Männer arbeiten also etwas gleich. Zu den Zahlen:
Among the 27 countries women’s (unweighted) average total work is 446.4 minutes per day (s.e. = 8.6), men’s is 421.7 minutes (s.e. = 8.9). Women’s total work significantly exceeds men’s in this sample, albeit not by a huge amount. If we restrict the sample to the 14 wealthy non-Catholic countries (2002 real GDP/capita above $15,000, from Heston et al 2006), the averages are 440.1 (s.e. = 7.4) and 431.4 (s.e. = 7.5) respectively, a statistically insignificant gender difference in total work.
Aus der weiteren Besprechung:
The first implication of our findings and attempts at explanation is linked to economic development. Our evidence documents convergence of total work across gender with GDP per capita. We show in Section 4 that this convergence can derive either from increasingly genderblind assignment to reference clusters with strong norms, or from a convergence of gender wageoffer distributions to a common one. The past half century has also seen secular, albeit slow convergence in gender wage differentials. These two phenomena are probably related, but what is their source? Has technical change augmented female market production relative to that of men? Is technical change in home production generally labor-saving (see Greenwood et al, 2005)? How have interactions of these two types of innovation combined to generate convergence in total work and the returns to market work? Examining these interactions without considering gender roles (e.g., Ngai and Pissarides, 2008) is a useful step; but given the significant differences in gender roles in less developed countries, understanding growth and development requires 18 accounting better for the convergence of total work and changes in the relative amounts of market and household work performed by men and women. This is especially true considering the different roles played by physical and intellectual attributes during economic development (Clark, 1940).
Also ein Angleichen der Arbeitszeiten bei besserer Wirtschaft
Second, household models typically assume that a spouse’s bargaining power is a function of her/his market earnings. Yet we have shown here, at least for most rich economies, that gender differences in the amounts of non-work time are tiny. How can this be true if, as is still the case, men have substantially higher wage rates and market earnings? Three logical possibilities present themselves. Men have more power, but are altruistic toward their spouses and toward women generally, and do not take advantage of it. Another is that economists’ modeling of the household has been incorrect, and market earnings do not generate power in the household. A final alternative is that earnings do generate power, men are not altruistic, but the average man’s utility from his market and home work exceeds that of the average woman’s from the same total amount of work. This last possibility would formalize ideas of the few sociologists who have confronted the issue (e.g., Mattingly and Bianchi, 2003). Yet this possibility shifts the discussion to why women find their work more onerous than men find theirs. Why, e.g., is the marginal minute spent in an office dealing with recalcitrant colleagues and supervisors more pleasurable than the marginal minute spent baking a cake?
Dieser Absatz zeigt meiner Meinung nach eher, dass eine rein ökonomische Betrachtung in der Sache nicht weiterhilft, sondern verschiedene Faktoren zu berücksichtigen sind: Die Statusorientierung der Männer, die verschiedenen Interessen der Geschlechter, Sex, Kinder etc.