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

TIME-USE OF WOMEN AND MEN IN IRELAND

here the combined workload of men and women in male breadwinner
households is marginally higher (i.e., 15 minutes higher) than the combined
workload of those in dual-earner households. However, on the basis of 5 week-
days and 2 weekend days per week, men and women in dual-earner couples
have higher committed time than men and women in breadwinner couples.
Note that at weekends it is the women in both dual earner and male
breadwinner households who have significantly longer committed time than
any other group.

Table 7: Time-Use Among Women and Men by Household Employment

Source: Irish National Time-Use Survey 2005.

Note: Single respondents do not necessarily live alone.

3.3 Threshold Measures of Time Poverty

A common standard for measuring (income) poverty is 50 per cent or 60
per cent of median income, with those below this threshold judged to be poor.
Following Bittman (2004a), an analogous standard (60 per cent of median
uncommitted time) was applied as an alternative way of investigating which
individuals in Ireland are ‘time poor’, relative to others. Using this cut-off we
find that less than 5 per cent of the population can be defined as time poor in
terms of uncommitted time on weekdays. This threshold for uncommitted time
is 8 hours and 42 minutes: which is the total amount of time available to fit in
eating, sleeping, personal care, leisure, voluntary activity and religious
activity. On weekends 7 per cent of respondents fall below the uncommitted
time threshold.¹⁷ As people have fewer paid work commitments at the
weekend the 60 per cent threshold is considerably higher than on weekdays,
with the time poor defined as those with less than 10 hours 48 minutes of
uncommitted time.

¹⁷ This is somewhat counter-intuitive as respondents clearly have more uncommitted and leisure
time at the weekends. However, the results emerge because variation in free-time is wider at the
weekend.

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