Do men or women work harder?

By David Sillito
BBC News correspondent

The amount men and women work varies from country to country

Here's a little question for you: Who works hardest, men or women?

It's women, isn't it?

Indeed, most people (and academics) think it's women but it appears they are wrong.

A study from America's National Bureau of Economic Research has found that across northern Europe and America, the total workload combining activity both at work and home is now shared almost equally.

Women still do more housework but men make up for it in the workplace.

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The study was carried out by a group of economists who set out to look at why Americans seem to work so much harder than Europeans. They were stunned when they spotted this other fact lurking in the data.

Philippe Weil from the Universite Libre in Brussels said: "This has been an argument in the gender war, that women have this double burden hitting them but we do not find evidence in rich northern countries that this is the case."

Nevertheless, many women do feel they have less spare time than men; but the answer may not lie with work, but sleep according to Mr Weil.

"The time spent not working is identical for men and women. How this time is used differs for men and women and it turns out that women for instance spend much more time sleeping than men do and that extra time that women spend sleeping, men usually spend watching TV, so that may explain the perception that women have less free time."

The study, by Michael Burda, Dan Hamermesh and Philippe Weil, has also noted that there appears to be a link between the work gap between men and women and how rich a country is. The smaller the gap, the richer the GDP per person. Equality appears to pay.

'Emotional housework'

There are also interesting differences between countries.

Overall it's Americans who work hardest, and on average it's the men who work slightly more with 476 minutes a day to 472 for women. However, in blue-collar families, more of the burden of work falls on women. In college-educated couples, it's the men who work more than women.

In Britain, people don't work such long hours, but women manage to do slightly more, with 428 to 418 minutes a day.

In countries with less of a work hours gap between genders, GDP per person is higher

But the big gap comes further south. Italian women spend on average an hour and a quarter more each day working than their menfolk and it's all down to housework, especially cleaning.

In Italy, women do three times more than the men yet spend just as much time earning a living as German and Dutch women.

Dutch, American, Swedish and Norwegian men all do slightly more than women, whereas women do more than men in Belgium, Britain, Denmark and France, where there's a considerable gap.

However, the perception among many academics and the public is that there is a wider gap and that women have a much bigger workload. More than 70% of sociologists thought women worked considerably longer than men.

And many are sceptical about the research. Anna Thorburn from Global Women's Strike, a body campaigning for greater recognition of the work women do, says it doesn't recognise how women work. For instance it ignores what she calls 'emotional housework'.

"It's the organising and planning and maintaining of relationships that women do. When men stop working they switch off. Women are constantly on the go, juggling things to keep things going."

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