Gender Inequalities in Time Use: The Distribution of Caring, Housework and Employment Among Women and Men in Ireland

This report uses time-use diaries from the nationally representative Irish National Time-Use Survey, 2005 to gather information on paid and unpaid labour from 1,089 adults in Ireland. The distribution of work is very different for men and women. Men spent a lot more time on paid work, while women spent substantially more time on caring and housework. Including paid and unpaid work and travel, women work on average around forty minutes longer per day than men, controlling for other factors. Compared to couples where the wife does not work for pay, working women do less work at home and their husbands do more, resulting in a more equal division of labour in these "dual earner" couples. But women in dual earner couples still do more unpaid work than their husbands, and they have a higher total workload than either their husbands or non-working women. Parenthood brings a reallocation of time. Fathers do more paid work than other men, on average, mothers spend more time doing unpaid work than non-mothers, leaving a more traditional division of labour in couples with children.