Who Gets the Free Time?

Time Tracking and Equity at Home

“We all have the same 24 hours in a day.”

Said a man, who has never been a mom, trying to convince you that if you were just better at managing your time, it would solve most of your problems. It makes sense in theory, but in the real world, we don’t all have the same 24 hours in a day. We all have constraints on our time that others don’t have. Some are by choice, but many are not.

In her book, Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours, Corinne Low, PhD, perfectly illustrates this with a graph using data from the American Time Use Survey.

This graph plots the difference between men’s time and women’s time spent on four categories of activities: work, leisure, housework, and childcare. It shows the time difference for each category (women’s minutes minus men’s minus), broken down by age. As you can see, between the ages of 20 and 50, women do more housework and childcare while men spend more time on (paid) work and leisure.

Most of us don’t need a graph to know this is true, but it’s always better to have the data.

Getting to Equity

Disclaimer: As always, this is meant for people in secure relationships where there is no threat of abuse or violence. You know your partner and relationship best.

If you want to even the scales in your relationship, it needs to be intentional. Otherwise, you’ll probably end up with very similar results to this graph.

I wrote about how time inequality snuck up in my own life, and it was my most read article ten times over: Golf and a Costco Run Are Not the Same. What I want to do now is to give you a path from inequality to equity. Unfortunately, doing nothing will most likely lead your relationship toward inequality. It’s no one’s fault, but in a patriarchal society that places different expectations on men and women and values our time differently, it’s so easy to end up there.

Your goal might not be for you and your partner to spend equal amounts of time working, doing housework, and caring for your children (if you have them). Maybe you’d prefer to spend more time on housework and childcare because you don’t like your job. Or maybe you love your work and would prefer to do less housework. That’s why I use the term “equity” and not “equality” because even if things aren’t divided 50/50, they should be divided fairly.

You can think of it this way. There is a certain amount of work, childcare, and housework that needs to be done overall, and there are two of you. You should divide the amount of time spent on those things fairly, and you should both end up with the same amount of leisure time after the work is divided.

Photo by Icons8 Team on Unsplash

Step 1: Get Clear on Your Preferences

As a starting point, you and your partner each need to decide on what your preferences are. Hopefully they align, but if they don’t, the next step is to find some common ground or compromise in a way that feels fair to both of you.

For example, if you would both prefer to work more and do less housework, then maybe you outsource as much housework as you can.

Here are a few sample discussion questions to get you started: