Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

Iceland’s strike does anything it is surely to expose the term ‘working woman’ as a tautology. There is no such thing as a woman who doesn’t work. There is only a woman who isn’t paid for her work.

Globally, 75% of unpaid work is done by women,⁷ who spend between three and six hours per day on it compared to men’s average of thirty minutes to two hours.⁸ This imbalance starts early (girls as young as five do significantly more household chores than their brothers) and increases as they get older. Even in the country with the highest male unpaid working time (Denmark), men still spend less time on unpaid work than women in the country with the lowest female unpaid working time, Norway.⁹

Whenever I raise the issue of the unpaid-work imbalance between men and women, I am invariably faced with the comment, ‘But, surely, it’s getting better? Surely men are gradually doing more of their share?’ And at an individual level, sure, there are men who are doing more. But at a population level? Well, no, not really, because it turns out that the proportion of unpaid work men do is remarkably sticky. An Australian study found that even in wealthier couples who pay for domestic help, the remaining unpaid work is still distributed at the same male to female ratio, with women still doing the majority of what’s left.¹⁰ And as women have increasingly joined the paid labour force men have not matched this shift with a comparative increase in their unpaid work: women have simply increased their total work time, with numerous studies over the past twenty years finding that women do the majority of unpaid work irrespective of the proportion of household income they bring in.¹¹

Even when men do increase their unpaid work, it isn’t by doing the routine housework¹² that forms the majority of the workload,¹³ instead creaming off the more enjoyable activities like childcare. On average, 61% of housework is undertaken by women. In India, for example, five out of women’s six daily hours of unpaid labour are spent on housework, compared to men’s thirteen minutes.¹⁴ It’s also rare for men to take on the more personal, messy, emotionally draining aspects of elder care work. In the UK up to 70% of all unpaid dementia carers are women,¹⁵ and female carers are more likely to help with bathing, dressing, using the toilet and managing incontinence.¹⁶ Women are more than twice as likely as men to be providing intensive on-duty care for someone twenty-four hours a day, and to have been caring for someone with dementia for more than five years.¹⁷ Female carers also tend to receive less support than male carers so they end up feeling more isolated and being more likely to suffer from depression – in itself a risk factor for dementia.¹⁸

Men, meanwhile, have carried on engaging in leisure pursuits – watching TV, playing sports, playing computer games. US men manage to find over an hour more spare time per day to rest than their female counterparts,¹⁹ while in the UK, the Office for National Statistics found that men enjoy five hours more leisure time per week than women.²⁰ And an Australian study found that what little leisure time women do have is ‘more fractured and combined with other tasks’ than men’s.²¹

The upshot is that around the world, with very few exceptions, women work longer hours than men. Sex-disaggregated data is not available for all countries, but for those where the data exists, the trend is clear. In Korea, women work for thirty-four minutes longer than men per day, in Portugal it’s ninety minutes, in China it’s forty-four minutes, and in South Africa it’s forty-eight minutes.²² The size of the gap varies from country to country (the World Bank estimates that in Uganda women work an average of fifteen hours every day to men’s average of nine hours), but the existence of a gap remains more or less constant.²³

A 2010 US study on the imbalance between the amount of unpaid work done by male and female scientists found that female scientists do 54% of the cooking, cleaning and laundry in their households, adding more than ten hours to their nearly sixty-hour work week, while men’s contribution (28%) adds only half that time.²⁴ The women in their data set also did 54% of parenting labour in their households, while male scientists did 36%. In India, 66% of women’s work time is spent on unpaid labour, while only 12% of men’s work is unpaid. In Italy, 61% of women’s work is unpaid compared to 23% of men’s. In France, 57% of their work is unpaid compared to 38% of men’s.

All this extra work is affecting women’s health. We have long known that women (in particular women under fifty-five) have worse outcomes than men following heart surgery. But it wasn’t until a Canadian study came out in 2016 that researchers were able to isolate women’s care burden as one of the factors behind this discrepancy. ‘We have noticed that women who have bypass surgery tend to go right back into their caregiver roles, while men were more likely to have someone to look after them,’ explained lead researcher Colleen Norris.²⁵

This observation may go some way to explaining why a Finnish study²⁶ found that single women recovered better from heart attacks than married women – particularly when put alongside a University of Michigan study²⁷ which found that husbands create an extra seven hours of housework a week for women. An Australian study similarly found that housework time is most equal by gender for single men and women; when women start to cohabit, ‘their housework time goes up while men’s goes down, regardless of their employment status’.²⁸

The Economist isn’t alone in forgetting about women’s unpaid workload in their discussions of ‘work’. When business magazines like Inc publish think-pieces telling us that ‘science’ tells us ‘you’ shouldn’t work more than forty hours a week,²⁹ or when the Guardian informs us that ‘your job could be killing you’ if