New Equality Bill Needed to Grant Men More Leisure
Civitas, 9 March 2010
Yesterday to mark International Women’s Day, the OECD published a report comparing the amounts of leisure enjoyed on average per day by men and women in the developed world. The report found that, on average, women enjoyed less leisure than men, a finding that led it to conclude that ‘governments and firms need to do more to tackle the gender equality gap’.
I wonder how keen the OECD would have been to make such a call had the methodology it employed to compute the quantities of leisure enjoyed by the two sexes not been quite so obviously flawed.
Included as work, and therefore not as leisure, were all shopping, child-care, and time given over to the maintenance or embellishment of personal appearance. All these forms of unpaid activity are ones in which women expend considerably more time than men. They are, also, notoriously forms of activity in which many women engage for their own sake. Whenever so undertaken, they should be counted as leisure, not work: but they were not in the OECD report.
But the OECD report was guilty of a far worse methodological defect. It took no account of relative life expectancies of the two sexes. Computations of amounts of leisure were made on the basis of self-reports of men and women, hence over periods in which they were both alive.
However, the amount of leisure people enjoy varies over their life-cycles. They tend to enjoy more of it in the later years of life and of which women tend to enjoy very many more.
The OECD report acknowledges this methodological defect, by conceding that: ‘To obtain a true picture of leisure over the life cycle, longitudinal data comparing the entire life cycle would be warranted. However, such data are not available.’
Women enjoy on average several more years of life than men, years that, by definition, occur at the end of the life-cycle, when the ratio of leisure to work is high.
If the extra quantity of leisure that women tend, on average, to enjoy as a result of living longer than men were factored into the equation, I wonder just which sex would be found to enjoy less of it.
I also wonder why such a computation was not made.
It does not seem impossible, or even very difficult in principle, to devise estimates of the average extra amount of leisure women enjoy on average as a result of living longer.
Might the reason such estimates not have been factored into the equation been because of the adverse effect they would have had in terms of proving women victims of a social injustice in this domain?
Whatever the reason for their non-inclusion, it constitutes such a gross omission as to vitiate the entire report.
Lest it be thought that men owe their shorter lives entirely to their own less prudent and temperate life-styles, it should be noted that a substantial part of the difference in the shorter average life-expectancy seems down to biological differences between the sexes and not to behaviour.
As much as almost a third of the difference has been estimated as due to genetic differences. Given that the present life-expectancy of girls in the UK is 81.6 years and that of boys 77.4 years, it would seem women may expect to enjoy more than a year of extra life at a time of life when work commitments are least.
Not only that. That extra year of leisure is enjoyed by women when they do not seemingly have to put up with the company of the other sex, unlike men who never seemingly can look forward to such a period of life.
All told, I suspect that feminists would do best to bury this report. Otherwise they might draw the need to equalise leisure between the sexes to the attention of the equalities brigade. Should that happen, and the computations be done correctly, they may find on their hands a New Equality Bill that demands that, for the sake of equalising leisure between the sexes over their life-cycles, until the age of retirement women should have to work 1.5 hours for every hour that men do.