Work Rich, Time Poor? Time-Use of Women and Men in Ireland

provided by Research Papers in Economics

The Economic and Social Review, Vol. 38, No. 3, Winter, 2007, pp. 323-354

Work Rich, Time Poor?

Time-Use of Women and Men in Ireland*

FRANCES McGINNITY

HELEN RUSSELL

The Economic and Social Research Institute, Dublin

Abstract: Are we running out of time? This paper uses data from a recently completed time-use
survey in Ireland to consider whether the recent employment growth has led to high workloads,
time-pressure and a lack of free time. We examine levels of total committed time, that is, time
spent on employment/education, unpaid work (caring and household work) and travel, across
different groups in the population. We find high workloads among the employed and those caring
for young children and adults. High levels of committed time are found to be associated with
greater subjective feelings of time-pressure. Our evidence suggests that recent employment
growth is likely to have contributed to time poverty and feelings of time-pressure.

I DEBATES ON WORK AND LEISURE

Are we ‘running out of time’? There has been a growing controversy in the
international literature in the last decade about whether economic growth
has led to a perverse result - more work and less leisure. It seems possible

*The data on which this study is based was funded by the NDP Gender Equality Unit of the
Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform and is publicly available from the Data Archive
in University College Dublin. We would like to thank the staff of the Unit and the Central
Statistics Office (CSO) for their advice on the project. We would also like to gratefully acknowledge
our colleagues James Williams and Sylvia Blackwell, for their work on the development of the
Irish National Time-Use Survey. Thanks also to two anonymous ESR reviewers for thir helpful
comments.

Corresponding author: Dr Frances McGinnity, ESRI, Whitaker Square, Sir John Rogerson’s
Quay, Dublin 2. Email: [email protected].

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