Heteronormative division of labour in figures - on the current time use survey

Every ten years, the Federal Statistical Office publishes a time utilisation survey. This regularly confirms that unpaid work makes up the majority of social labour and that the gender-hierarchical division of labour is extremely persistent despite all the struggles and criticism. But the changes between the surveys are also important for our practice. Matthias Neumann has attempted an overview of these changes; we welcome - as always! - for criticism and contributions to the discussion. The text can be read below or here as a PDF.

The Time Use Survey, which the Federal Statistical Office publishes at ten-year intervals, is our most important source of data when it comes to providing evidence of the quantitative significance of unpaid work and to empirically substantiate statements on how gender norms change or remain stable in practices of gendered division of labour. The fact that this survey has existed since the early 1990s was fought for by the feminist movement, and when the Care Revolution network was founded, it was certainly important that this data existed and that feminist researchers were working with it[1]. This spring, just in time for the network's tenth anniversary, so to speak, the results of what is now the fourth time-use survey have been published. It is clear that the large time gap between the surveys is problematic: the data is from 2022, and it is not possible to tell what a medium or long-term trend is and where the reactions to the coronavirus pandemic are reflected.

This article is not intended to be a comprehensive account of the patriarchal gender division of labour; the basics have often and clearly been worked out and criticised (see footnote 1, for example). I am concerned here with what I consider to be a few remarkable and sometimes surprising changes compared to the last survey.[2] The following comparisons therefore refer to 2022 compared to 2012/3, unless otherwise stated.

1) The time that women[3] spend on unpaid and paid work has remained almost unchanged in both absolute and relative terms.[4] The fact that the share of unpaid work in total work has risen slightly is due to the fact that there has been a shift towards unpaid work among men. The trend of the last three surveys that the share of paid work in total work is falling is therefore not continuing according to the survey.[5] However, it seems quite possible that this will change again in the following years, as the dip in the volume of gainful employment due to the pandemic[6] has not yet been compensated for in 2022.[7] As the female employment rate continues to rise, albeit at a slower rate (2012-2022 +5.0 percentage points; 2002-2012 +9.2 percentage points)[8], the reason is certainly the increase in part-time employment[9].

2) When paid and unpaid work are added together, women work slightly more than men. However, the difference is quite small at 3%. However, this by no means says everything about the burden resulting from the gender-hierarchical division of labour. In particular, the mental load[10], the permanent confrontation with work tasks and scheduling in the family, or the burden of "making good weather" as forms of permanent stress, in "free time" or while doing other things, are inevitably not covered by this survey and are certainly very unequally distributed. The type of work, simultaneity of tasks, plannable free time and other factors must also be taken into account when talking about workload. Due to the increasing proportion of unpaid work among men, the gender care gap has fallen from 52.4% (read: women perform 152.4% of the unpaid working hours of men) to 44.3%.

3) A closer look at the gender gap in unpaid work shows that the difference in the amount of unpaid work is due to the areas of cooking (gap: 84.4%), maintaining the home and clothing (gap: 127%) and looking after household members (gap: 90.1%). If we now look at childcare in more detail, we can see that the gap for games, sports and supervision is 37%, and 152% for "personal hygiene, feeding, dressing, medical care". This is already relevant when it comes to workload, not just working hours, and also points to the persistence of the traditional division of labour.

4) Total working hours are significantly higher in households with children (single parents and couples)[11] than in households without children, by 23.7%. This difference shows how important the Care Revolution core demands are: Expanding supportive social infrastructure, individual security independent of employment, challenging the hegemony of the nuclear family. Men with children in the household work around 4.5 hours more in paid work and 7.5 hours more in unpaid work than men without children. Women with children in the household work 15 hours more in unpaid work and five hours less in paid work than women without children[12].

Men and women in households with children have the same total working hours, while, I was surprised by this contrast, women in households without children have higher total working hours. In particular, men work 6:45 hours less in the unpaid sector than women, without this being explained by parental roles (however peculiar). It would be interesting to obtain further information here: Are households without children simply households with a higher average age, so that traditional gender roles apply even more unbroken here, or are there other reasons? However, the published tables are not detailed enough to get any closer to an answer[13].

5) When looking at how the amount of work done by women has changed in the ten years between the surveys, two clear changes emerge: Firstly, women with children aged 6 to 18 do significantly more paid work than in 2012/3 (+11.8%). For women with younger children and women without children in the household, on the other hand, the amount of gainful employment fell.

6) The second major change in this context is that the amount of unpaid work performed by men has increased, but there has also been a very small average increase in unpaid work performed by women. Surprisingly for me in this contrast, however, this is exclusively due to the fact that women with small children under the age of 6 do 5.2% more unpaid work. For women without children and with older children, on the other hand, the amount of unpaid work decreases. Why is this the case? Four possibilities are obvious: 1. the data was collected in 2022. During this time, daycare centres may have been closed or had limited opening hours due to coronavirus, meaning that more childcare was provided at home. In fact, the childcare rate for under-6s fell in 2021 for the first time in 15 years,[14] but the significant increase in the childcare rate over the last ten years cannot make up for this.[15] 2. home office has been expanded, so that situations arise more frequently in which gaps and breaks in working life are also childcare time. However, this is also countered by the increased daycare centre rate. After all, we are talking about a period of ten years in which the trend towards expanding daycare centres overlaps with the trend towards working from home. 3) The pressure to be a "good parent" and spend as much time as possible with and for the children has certainly increased over the last ten years and is reflected in real-life activities. Is this reflected so exclusively in younger children or is it such a new phenomenon that it mainly affects younger parents with younger children? 4. it is now much more widely accepted how extensive work is that is not remunerated. It is quite conceivable that parents are less reluctant to record childcare hours as such and not as free time. Part of the explanation may therefore be that not so much is done differently, but that it is valued differently. That would even be a success.

6) Finally, the time utilisation survey asked about the feeling of loneliness for the first time. This showed that single parents have by far the highest risk of loneliness: 39.7% of the single parents surveyed stated that they often felt lonely, compared to 16.4% of all respondents. This figure is also significantly higher than for those living alone (26.2%)[16].

In my view, it is important to note that the Time Use Survey is an extremely important source and provides us with suggestions as to where political action should be taken. For example, it is clear that caring for children and people in need of care overburdens individuals and couples - an expanded social infrastructure and communal solutions beyond the nuclear family are obvious. Or the risk of loneliness among single parents: the Freiburg Polyclinic Initiative is setting up a parent-child café for this very reason.[17] However, it is also clear that the figures do not explain social processes and structures. At best, they can indicate what needs to be understood at a social level. However, statistics can only be one of our approaches to the field alongside discussions, our own experiences, everyday perceptions, the evaluation of political processes, etc., if only because we not only want to understand society, but also to change it. However, understanding itself is ultimately not possible without analysing the concrete life situations of individual people.

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[1] Winker, Gabriele: Care Revolution. Steps towards a society based on solidarity; transcript 2015

[2] Main source: https://www.destatis.de/DE/Presse/Pressekonferenzen/2024/zve2022/statement-zve.pdf?__blob=publicationFile. Unless otherwise stated, the ratios are my own calculations. Any errors are my own.

[3] The binary gender designation corresponds to the binary recording in the statistics. There is no data on non-binary persons in this survey. I have not checked whether this is due to the specifications in the form or to the low number of responses from non-binary persons.

[4] This statement, like all others, only applies to the average of the group mentioned. Nothing can be deduced from these results either about individual persons or subgroups, unless they are shown.

[5] This trend has been proven by the Time Use Survey since the beginning of the 1990s and has so far been reliable. This does not call into question the fact that the majority of work is unpaid. A fortiori, the trend gives no reason to assume that capitalism will eventually make unpaid labour irrelevant.

[6] https://doku.iab.de/forschungsbericht/2023/fb1823.pdf

[7] Cf. the volume of gainful employment, which has risen again since then: https://doku.iab.de/arbeitsmarktdaten/AZ_Komponenten.xlsx

[8] https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Arbeit/Arbeitsmarkt/Erwerbstaetigkeit/Tabellen/erwerbstaetigenquoten-gebietsstand-geschlecht-altergruppe-mikrozensus.html

[9] https://doku.iab.de/arbeitsmarktdaten/AZ_Komponenten.xlsx

[10] https://equalcareday.org/mental-load/

[11] For those who lack options here: The problems mentioned in FN 2 also apply here.

[12] https://www.destatis.de/DE/Presse/Pressekonferenzen/2024/zve2022/statement-zve.pdf?__blob=publicationFile; P.8

[13] https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Einkommen-Konsum-Lebensbedingungen/Zeitverwendung/Publikationen/Downloads-Zeitverwendung/zeitverwendung-5639102139004.html?nn=210184

[14] https://www.kindergartenpaedagogik.de/fachartikel/kita-politik/bildungspolitik/1650/

[15] "The number of children cared for in daycare centres has risen by 22% in the same period - from 3.21 million in 2013 to 3.93 million in 2023. The increase is mainly due to the expansion of care for children under the age of three: 721,600 children under the age of three were most recently cared for in daycare centres, 43% more than ten years earlier (503,900)." (Press release from the Federal Statistical Office from January 2024) https://www.destatis.de/DE/Presse/Pressemitteilungen/2024/01/PD24_N004_p002.html

[16] https://www.destatis.de/DE/Presse/Pressekonferenzen/2024/zve2022/statement-zve.pdf?__blob=publicationFile (P.12-14)

[17] https://care-revolution.org/aktuelles/ein-gesundheitszentrum-fuer-einen-solidarischen-stadtteil/