TIME-USE OF WOMEN AND MEN IN IRELAND
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individuals are under considerably more time-pressure, others under much
less. Jacobs and Gerson (2004) rely on paid labour statistics, and speculate on
time spent on unpaid labour. Time-use data is more appropriate for examining
their argument as it permits analysis of both paid and unpaid labour. More
recent work by Bianchi and colleagues uses time-use data to analyse the
changing time-use patterns of American parents (Bianchi et al., 2006).
Following the shift to dual-earner families, they find less leisure time for both
mothers and fathers in dual-earner families than in the past, and greater
overall workloads, along with some reallocation of tasks between men and
women. However, they point to the role of subjective expectations in adding to
time-pressure. Working parents, particularly mothers, feel a time squeeze
because they feel they should be spending more time with children - even
though mothers are spending as much time interacting with children as they
were 40 years ago (Bianchi et al., 2006).
Gershuny (2005), in a recent article, “Busyness as the badge of honour”,
argues that the reason people are feeling busier is that there is now a positive
view of busyness and lack of leisure. He takes as his starting point Becker’s
(1965) important argument that time and goods are substitutable. People with
higher earning power will work more and concentrate on ‘goods intensive’
leisure to maximise utility; lower earners with lower purchasing power will
favour ‘time intensive’ leisure and purchase fewer commodities. Thus higher
wage rates mean longer hours of paid work. Gershuny’s addition is to stress
the importance of paid work relative to leisure for privileged social positions.
He argues that there has been a shift from leisure having high status to work
having high status. Historically, those who could afford a life of ‘idleness’ had
the highest status. “Access to leisure was perhaps the prime means through
which the superordinate class differentiated itself from the subordinate”
(Gershuny, 2005, p. 49). However, the emergence of mass unemployment,
along with other social changes, devalued ‘idleness’ and it is argued that being
busy is now a positive, privileged position and it is high status people who
work long hours and feel busy. In a recent paper using US time-use data
Aguiar and Hurst (2007) find evidence consistent with this hypothesis. In the
last forty years the largest increase in leisure has been for the less educated.
There is now a growing inequality in leisure that is the inverse of inequality
of wages and expenditure: the income poor are ‘time rich’ and the income rich
are ‘time poor’.
In this paper we consider the issue of time poverty and perceptions of
time-pressure in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland. In the following section we look at
changing patterns of employment and working time in Ireland using evidence
from existing labour market data before turning to examine these issues using
new time-use data for Ireland.