TIME-USE OF WOMEN AND MEN IN IRELAND
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qualitative research investigating the topic, Southerton (2003) argues that
concentrating tasks into ‘hot spots’ in order to free up other time slots (‘cold
spots’) to enjoy with family and friends contributes to individuals feeling
‘harried’, rather than the overall amount of time spent on tasks. Bianchi et al.
(2006) stress the role of expectations: working parents in the US, particularly
mothers, feel that they do not spend enough time with their children, even
though objectively time spent interacting with children has not declined.
Further research would need to investigate how committed time in Ireland is
distributed throughout the day, whether and how activities are combined, how
time-use relates to the time-use of others in the household, and perhaps how
exactly respondents’ time-use relates to their expectations of how they feel
they should be spending their time.
V CONCLUSION
Both internationally and in Ireland there is an increasing sense of time-
pressure and a feeling that we are running out of time. In the context of rapid
employment growth over the past decade, Ireland is a particularly interesting
case in which to examine ‘time poverty’. While it is overstating the case to
argue that new time-pressures have neutralised the benefits of increased
prosperity (see McGinnity et al., 2007), our evidence suggests that there may
be trade-offs between increased employment and associated economic wealth,
and free time.
While we could not look at over-time comparisons, we use the recently
collected first national time-use survey to 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
workloads are particularly high among the self-employed, employees, parents
of young children and those caring for adults. Committed time is similar for
men and women on weekdays but women have significantly less free time
than men at weekends due to high levels of unpaid work. High levels of
committed time are found to be associated with greater subjective feelings of
time-pressure, though it is not just those with high committed time who feel
under time-pressure. Those in paid employment feel more rushed, even after
accounting for the fact that they have higher levels of committed time than the
non-employed.
We find some evidence that ‘being busy’ is associated with higher incomes
and education in Ireland, as Gershuny (2005) posits, though this association
does not always remain when we control for employment status and age.
Investigating Linder’s proposition of more ‘harried’ or ‘intense’ leisure will