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this classification ‘committed’ time (paid and unpaid work) is given a higher
priority than ‘free time’. A specific example is that childcare combined with
leisure will count as childcare. Thus care may be overestimated, and leisure
underestimated.9 An alternative strategy is to divide the time lost equally
between each of the activities. For example, if paid work, eating and travel are
recorded together in one 15 minute time-slot, each activity is assigned 5
minutes. Estimates using these time-use estimates are presented in Appendix
A. While intuitively appealing, this may not be as close to how people actually
experience time as giving one activity priority. We thus prefer to present
estimates using the priority settings in the main text of this paper.
The figures on weekday/weekend time-use applying the main activity
definition are presented in Table 3. The allocation of sub-activities to these
summary groups is evident from the previous table (Table 2).10 Note that the
average time spent on any activity across the sample is a function of both the
proportion of people who engage in that activity and the amount of time those
individuals spend on the activities. (In the main survey report we present
figures on the proportion of men and women participating in each activity, and
also further details of time spent on each of the 26 activities, see McGinnity et
al. (2005)).
From Table 3 we see that on weekdays women spend almost five times
longer on caring activities than men. Domestic labour is also significantly
higher for women than men. In contrast, employment/study is significantly
higher for men. If we add these three categories together women spend an
average of 7 hours 48 minutes on these three activities and men spend an
average of 7 hours 28 minutes. On average men spend 21 minutes more than
women on leisure and voluntary activities,11 while women spend 16 minutes
more time sleeping than men on weekdays.
Similar gender patterns emerge for the weekend. Men continue to spend
longer in paid employment/study (almost one hour more), while women spend
twice as much time on caring and household work (5 hours versus 2 hours
24 minutes). This leads to a significant leisure gap between women and men
9 Some researchers have listed activity combinations, i.e. childcare plus watching TV. However,
the number of different activity combinations in the Irish Time-Use data meant it was not feasible
to pursue this strategy.
10 Note that in grouping activities we have followed normal conventions. For example, gardening,
DIY and shopping are counted as household tasks, whereas in some instances and/or for some
people these might be seen as leisure activities. It is not possible to incorporate this variation in
the ‘status’ of activities in such simple activity groupings but it should be noted that some blurring
of the boundaries between activity groups occurs.
11 It should be remembered that voluntary and religious activity only account for a small
proportion of time within this broad category (see Table 2.2 McGinnity et al., 2005). This category
includes both active leisure such as physical activity/going out and passive leisure (e.g. watching
TV, doing nothing, reading).