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  • The Time Divide: Work, Family and Gender Inequality
  • Geoffrey Godbey
The Time Divide: Work, Family and Gender Inequality By Jerry A. Jacobs and Kathleen Gerson Harvard University Press, 2004. $45 (cloth), $19.95 (paper).

In The Time Divide, Jacobs and Gerson argue that a time crunch exists in America that cannot be overcome by individual efforts but rather requires changes in social policy. According to the authors:

"Working parents in dual-earner and single parent households have always faced a time bind, and the principal change over the last thirty years has been a marked growth in the number of people living in these family situations."

P. 39

The issues of this book, to a great extent, reflect not only changes in women's roles and expectations but also the emergence of a knowledge economy in which a minority of workers with higher levels of education and income work longer hours than those with lower levels. The authors examine hours of work and find evidence of this division.

They reject the conclusions of Robinson and Godbey (1999) that free time has actually increased. Part of the reason for this rejection is the authors' conclusions that self-reported hours of workers, used to measure working time by the Federal government, is an accurate measure of time spent on the job. "Across a range of groups, there is no evidence to support [End Page 2368] the claim that some groups of workers are especially prone to exaggerate their devotion to – or time spent at – their jobs." (p. 17) In spite of this claim, there is evidence that workers' time estimates do exaggerate actual hours of work when compared with their own time diaries, and the longer the hours of actual work recorded in time diaries the more they overestimate hours of work in self-reports (Robinson and Godbey, 1999). (At my own university, faculty members estimate they work an average of 55 hours a week, which would be 8 A.M. to 5 P.M. with an hour for lunch six days a week and 8 A.M. to 4 P.M. on Sunday!)

Jacobs and Gerson find not only that hours of work for the average worker have remained constant, but also that the short vacations of Americans are nothing new. What is new is a higher percentage of people in the labor force, with women's participation increasing since 1970 from 43 percent to 60 percent and men's declining somewhat from 80 percent to 76 percent. Parents are also spending more, rather than less, time with children.

The book maintains a politically correct tone in which "gender inequality" is automatically assumed to disadvantage females. Never mind that nine out of ten job-related deaths are males (Farrell, 2005) or that married males rarely have the option of working parttime or staying home. Never mind that it is not only married females who spend about twice as much time doing housework as their husbands. Women who live alone also spend twice as much time doing housework as men who live alone (Robinson and Godbey, 1999). There is also little attention given to the decline in time spent in housework by women. This decline during the past few decades, of roughly 12 hours a week, almost offsets the average additional time spent in paid work by females (Robinson and Godbey, 1999). The unspoken assumption of this book is that it would be desirable to have a society in which both responsibilities and time expenditures of males and females were equal in every category. It happens, however. All known societies, both past and present, have a division of labor by gender. As any anthropologist will tell you, males and females differ in terms of reproductive strategies and demands, so such a division is surely genetically derived.

The Time Divide convincingly argues that many institutions of society, from schools to employers, still operate as though U.S. households were composed of one-worker families. It also demonstrates how misleading aggregated statistics about time use can be. What could have been addressed more is whether or not two-worker households are increasingly composed of individuals with unrealistically high expectations.

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