自由时间的数量和质量的性别不平等：美国的经验

Gender Differences in the Quantity and Quality of Free Time: The U.S. Experience Author(s): Marybeth J. Mattingly and Suzanne M. Bianchi Source: Social Forces, Vol. 81, No. 3 (Mar., 2003), pp. 999-1030 Published by: University of North Carolina Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3598184 Accessed: 25/09/2008 12:35 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=uncpress. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. University of North Carolina Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Social Forces. http://www.jstor.org Gender Differences in the Quantity and Quality of Free Time: The U.S. Experience* MARYBETH J. MATTINGLY, University of Maryland SUZANNE M. BIANCHI, University of Maryland Abstract This study uses newly collected time diary data to assess gender differences in both quantity and quality offree time, including measures of contamination offree time by nonleisure activities such as household chores, thefragmentation offree time, and how frequently children's needs must be accommodated duringfree-time activities. Our findings suggest that men and women do experience free time very differently. Men tend to have more of it. Marriage and children exacerbate the gender gap and market work hours erode men's and women's free time in different ways. Ourfindings reveal that despite gains toward gender equality in other domains, discrepancies persist in the experience of free time. Although American society has made great strides toward gender equality, women remain disadvantaged in the labor market relative to men. Women have increased their presence in the paid workforce but hold less prestigious jobs and earn less than men (Blau, Ferber & Winkler 1998; Spain & Bianchi 1996). This inequality results in part because women perform more of the household labor, including childcare and housekeeping chores (Bianchi et al. 2000; Robinson & Godbey 1999:199). Different expectations of women and men based upon their dissimilar positions in the family and the market may also create gender differences in the experience of time that is not committed to paid market work or unpaid domestic work. Though much attention has been paid to women's double burden of market and household work (e.g., * Supportfor this research was provided by grants to the second authorfrom the National Science Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's Working Families Program. Direct correspondence to Marybeth J. Mattingly, Department of Sociology, Maryland Population Research Center, University of Maryland, 1103 Art/Sociology Building, College Park, MD 20742. E-mail: mmattingly@socy.umd.edu. ? The University of North Carolina Press Social Forces, March 2003, 81 (3):999-1030 1000 / Social Forces 81:3, March 2003 Hochschild & Machung 1989), studies of gender differences in other uses of time including free time activities are far less prevalent. Free time or leisure is an important aspect of daily life. Leisure affords individuals a chance to relax and refresh after performing household and labor market responsibilities. Through such time, individuals can escape some of the more tedious aspects of life and realize opportunities for personal growth. Additionally, this discretionary time is ideal for enrichment, reflection, and enjoyment of life. Without it, life can lose much of its value and meaning. It is through free time and leisure activities that people often enhance relationships and form the networks that they can draw upon later in times of need; that is, through these activities individuals create the social capital that is essential for well-being (Coleman 1988). Though sustaining relationships may be developed with colleagues at work and with family members who share domestic tasks, free time provides a unique opportunity for developing friendships and family ties that may not be possible during work (paid or unpaid) hours. Feminist researchers argue that free time is an especially problematic con- cept for women because the boundaries between unpaid domestic responsi- bilities (which fall disproportionately to women) and free-time pursuits are often unclear (Griffiths 1988:49). Also, creating family leisure opportunities may come at the time expense of those who orchestrate family life (see Deem 1996b, Di Leonardo 1992). Organizing a get-together for a child's birthday, for example, affords others a leisure experience while the organizer attends to plan- ning and preparation, as well as host(ess) responsibilities. Likewise, leisure may consist of activities that are age-appropriate for a child rather than those the adult might prefer in the absence of children. Thus, responsibilities tradition- ally left to women may interfere with, or contaminate, leisure. In this article, we take a fresh look at activities that time-use researchers typically classify as free time - time not committed to market work, domestic caregiving, or personal care. We build on recent research that examines gender differences in the quantity of free time across industrialized countries and develops quality measures of free time using Australian time diary data (Bittman & Wajcman 2000). We use time diary data for a nationally representative sample of Americans collected in 1998-99 in which we not only have reports of main, or primary, activities over a 24-hour period but also detailed information on simultaneous activities and with whom time is spent. These data allow us to construct measures of the quality of free time endeavors. We ask: Are American women's and men's experiences of free time quantitatively and qualitatively different? In particular, do women have less free time and is their free time more fragmented and contaminated by other demands than is men's? Do the multiple roles of spouse, parent, and worker reduce the quantity and quality of women's discretionary time more than men's? And, how do women and men's experiences of free time relate to their Gender Differences and Free Time / 1001 subjective perceptions of time pressure? Addressing these questions provides a valuable additional perspective on gender equality in U.S. society at the close of the twentieth century. Gender, Free Time, and the Roles of Spouse, Parent, and Worker A number of qualitative studies suggest that women's experience and enjoyment of free-time activities may be compromised by their responsibility for ensuring the quality of leisure experiences for others. Because women tend to be the coordinators of family life, it is often difficult for them to have time for themselves independent of household responsibilities (Deem 1987; Henderson et al. 1989; Wimbush & Talbot 1988). Women's activities on behalf of other family members are often invisible to others (except when not done). (See Di Leonardo 1992, for a discussion of women's work in building and maintaining social relationships and kinship ties.) Hence, women may be disadvantaged in terms of their enjoyment of family life because they disproportionately shoulder the responsibility for providing the setting (meals, preparation, decoration, etc.) for family activities, including free-time activities. Studies of holiday and vacation settings highlight the tension created by women's domestic caregiving responsibilities even during periods of relaxation. For example, through interviews with vacationing women in an English city, Deem (1996a) found that even while away from home, women felt the pressures of domestic responsibilities. Similarly, Wimbush and Talbot (1988: xix) note that for women, holidays and outings away from home are only a relative freedom from the workday surroundings and routines of daily life given that much of women's work is compounded by the preparation and planning of holidays. For those taking families with them, caring and cleaning roles are continued on vacations, often under less convenient and more stressful conditions. This discussion of women's vacation time emphasizes their role as provid- ers of opportunities for others to engage in enjoyable activities and their dis- proportionate responsibility (relative to men) for the work entailed. Harrington, Dawson, and Bolla (1992: 217) examine the constraints on leisure that women feel and find support for the thesis "that women are imbued with an ethic of care that leads them to take care of other people and consider the needs of others first, often at the expense of their own freedom from work and freedom for leisure." Feminist scholars note that interruptions resulting from combining work and family roles plague women's days more often than men's. Women tend to have greater responsibility for the care of children. Women who engage in market work and also perform the roles of wife and mother may be particularly 1002 / Social Forces 81:3, March 2003 susceptible to increased demands and are likely to experience leisure differently from their single and nonparent or nonemployed counterparts. A time availability perspective leads to the expectation that the performance requirements of each of the roles of spouse, parent, and worker potentially constrain time available for free-time pursuits. SPOUSE Berk (1985) and Berk and Berk (1979), in their early analyses of time diary data on married couples, showed that household work was allocated accord- ing to household exigencies but also that there was a normative component to the gender division of labor in the home. Berk (1985:165) argued that hus- bands and wives might be thought to share the same "home" work environ- ment, and that both of them are responsible for its tasks and upkeep, but the reality was that wives more often than husbands were charged with mainte- nance of the home. Later work by Shelton (1992:2) found that men did not have the same difficulties balancing work and family that women did because their household demands are less intrusive and more limited. Additionally, Milkie and Peltola (1999:479) note that "women's work in the home is differ- ent [from men's] more arduous, less flexible, and more likely to be interrupted." The type of household activities that men do (e.g., lawn maintenance or re- pair work) are more sporadic and can be scheduled when convenient whereas the type of work women do (e.g., cooking. cleaning, laundry) is often constant, repetitive, and unrelenting (Hochschild & Machung 1989). Hence, one might expect more contaminated free time and leisure, as women juggle daily family care demands. Indeed, Hessing (1994) finds that women often engage in more than one activity at a time in order to meet household demands in the lim- ited time available before and after work, and to complete tasks while at work. Trends in time spent doing housework suggest that women, including married women, are becoming more similar to men in their ability to shed household work in favor of other, presumably more enjoyable, activities. Still, in 1995, women spent almost twice as much time as men doing weekly household chores, which suggests a continued greater burden of domestic work on women (Bianchi et al. 2000). The ratio of women's to men's time doing domestic chores is greater for married than unmarried men and women (South & Spitze 1994). Further, there is evidence that when men marry, their share of housework actually goes down, whereas the opposite is true for women (Gupta 1999). Hence, recent evidence suggests that one might still expect increased leisure for men but reduced time for discretionary pursuits for women when they marry. Marriage should result in wives' free time in the home being much more often contaminated by household chores than husbands' time in the home. Gender Differences and Free Time / 1003 PARENT Early research on time use in the home showed that presence of children increased the overall demand for household work more than any other factor (Berk 1985). The more children one has and the younger they are, the greater the childcare demands on parents and the less likely the parents have discretionary time that is not spent with children (see Bittman & Wajcman 2000). Although fathers' involvement in family care may be increasing (Bianchi 2000; Bittman 1999; Fischer, McCulloch & Gershuny 1999; Sandberg & Hofferth 1999), it still more often falls to mothers to arrange family life, making sure family members get where they need to be, have what they need to eat, and have their homework and chores done. Additionally, mothers are most often the ones who curtail labor market participation to rear children (Budig & England 2001; Klerman & Leibowitz 1999: Waldfogel 1997). Berk (1985) suggests that patterns of household work, set up when children are young, tend to persist over time, keeping mothers' work in the home high relative to fathers'. LaRossa (1998) argues that despite changes in the ideology of fatherhood, little change in fathers' actual parenting behavior is apparent. Other research shows that the birth of a child increases nonmarket work for both parents, but the increase is much larger for mothers than fathers (Sanchez & Thomson 1997). Further, Freysinger (1994) finds that, although both men and women benefit from leisure time in the company of children, the benefit is far greater for fathers than for mothers. Hence, the expectation from the literature is that the role of parent may inhibit the quantity and quality of free time more for mothers than for fathers. WORKER As hours of market work increase, time available for other pursuits decreases, other things equal. Using time diary data, Nock and Kingston (1989) show that with more market work comes less leisure though the decline is not hour for hour. That is, an increase of an hour of market work does not automatically reduce leisure pursuits by an hour because individuals can make other trade- offs, perhaps foregoing housework or errands to fit in an activity like an afternoon run or an evening swim. If women's overall responsibility for managing family life is greater than men's, and family needs tend to be given priority over free-time pursuits, each additional hour of market work may crowd out more leisure for women than for men. This idea is consistent with Simon's (1995) findings on how women and men react to their employment and family roles. Though most women saw their positions in the family and the market as independent and in conflict, most men viewed the roles as interdependent. As a result, employed women were more likely to feel inadequate, that they were not fulfilling their home obligations. Hence, we 1004 / Social Forces 81:3, March 2003 might expect women's employment to offset leisure, as any available time is devoted to home and family demands. Even when women have paid jobs, they still have more responsibility than men for housework and child care (Bianchi et al. 2000; Hochschild & Machung 1989; Nock & Kingston 1989; Zick & Bryant 1996). Women more often than men constrain their activities in order to be close to home. Working mothers in particular face a time shortage: because their time in the home is limited by paid work, they may find it difficult to set aside domestic tasks for a leisure activity (Hochschild & Machung 1989). Hence, the role of employee might be expected to curtail women's leisure more than men's. FINDINGS FROM EARLIER TIME DIARY ASSESSMENTS In contrast to a number of qualitative studies that point to a leisure deficit for women, particularly working women with children, quantitative assessments from time diaries tend to show relatively small gender differences in the overall amount of free time (Bittman & Wajcman 2000; Robinson & Godbey 1999). Bryant (1996) notes that the impetus for the initial round of time diary studies done in the 1920s was the fear that industrialization might create "too much leisure" for men as jobs were automated but not reduce the drudgery of "too much work" for women who remained responsible for an array of household- based production and consumption activities. Yet studies to date have not borne out this fear of a growing gap in leisure between men and women. Although women spend more time in unpaid domestic work than men, men average more hours of paid work and, hence, time diary assessments of overall committed time (paid and unpaid work) indicate that there have traditionally been relatively small gender differences in total work time. That is, men's greater paid work hours tend to counterbalance women's greater unpaid family care and housework (see Marini & Shelton 1993; Robinson & Godbey 1999), and men and women tend to have similar amounts of free time available to them. Most time diary assessments of gender differences in free time rely solely on what time diary researchers refer to as primary activity, what a person reports as his or her main activity at each point in the day. However, it is known from studies where respondents are probed about "what else they were doing," that time in domestic tasks and childcare greatly expands when these secondary activities are reported. Zick and Bryant (1996), show that time spent in family care is 30% greater when secondary childcare time is included in estimates (for example, when estimates include time a mother reports visiting with a friend as her main activity but also reports that she was keeping an eye on her two-year old). A question that arises is whether, by greater attention to secondary activities and with whom free time is spent, we can explain part of the paradox between the qualitative findings, on the one hand, of women's leisure more often compromised than men's and the quantitative assessments Gender Differences and Free Time / 1005 leisure more often compromised than men's and the quantitative assessments that suggest only very limited gender differences in leisure experiences. Quantitative time-use studies of leisure pursuits may be missing the multitasking that contaminates free-time experiences more for women than for men because there is an almost exclusive reliance on data about primary activities and a lack of consideration of what else people are doing and who is with them when they engage in free-time activities. In a recent creative use of time diary evidence from Australia, Bittman and Wajcman (2000) argue that gender equality in the overall amount of free time captured in time diaries may conceal important differences in the quality of such time that men and women experience. Bittman and Wajcman (2000) develop three ideas: that leisure experiences can be more or less contaminated by simultaneous activities that are not as enjoyable, that the experience of lei- sure may be more fragmented for some t