They invest 28 hours a week and they, 43
Much remains to be done in co-responsibility in Spain: women dedicate 15 hours more each week than men to housework and caring for their sons and daughters, a total of 780 hours more per year.
The study Gender inequalities in paid and unpaid work after the pandemicmade public this Tuesday by the Social Observatory of the ”la Caixa” Foundation, indicates that men spend 28 hours a week caring for minors and doing household chores, but that figure It is still very far from the 43 hours that they dedicate.
“Women continue to assume a large part of the family responsibilities,” the research states.
Better indicators
Despite the gap that still exists, the authors of the study, Lídia Farré (University of Barcelona) and Libertad González (Pompeu Fabra University), detect an improvement compared to the pre-pandemic situation.
They now invest four hours more in this unpaid work than before the pandemic, while the total amount of them has decreased by two hours.
This involvement could give rise to a more egalitarian distribution of family responsibilities in the long term”, estimate the researchers, who attribute this “slightly more balanced” distribution to a effect of the pandemic, which had an impact when men were more exposed during confinement to family responsibilities, as well as when it came to being able to access more flexible working hours.
“Despite this, women continue to be primarily responsible for household chores and domestic care, as they dedicate 62% of his daycompared to 43% of men”, says the study.
That increased investment of men’s time is directed more to the children (after hours more than before the confinement, while they have shortened three hours in this), than to household issues. In housework, the gap has gone from 23 to 17% between 2020 and 2022.
Gap in chores
The gender differential is high in tasks such as do laundry (32% gap, down 9 points), cleaning (26%, down 6 points), food (19%, down 6 points) and shopping (8%, down 2 points). They only lead in repairs (32%). Advances are glimpsed, but they are insufficient.
The report, prepared in May 2022 from a sample of 4,000 people between the ages of 25 and 50, specifies that men dedicate 10 more hours per week to paid work, while women spend 11 more hours caring for minors and four hours more than they do domestic chores. Thus, the gender gap in work, paid and unpaid, stands at five hours, compared to 9 in 2020.
The numbers are better than two years before, when they worked 12 more hours in paid tasks (36 vs. 26), and they spent 17 more hours with minors and four more hours on domestic chores than they did.
As a consequence of the pandemic, more flexible working hours are registered with teleworking and compact hours. 33% of women and 30% of men telework at least one day a week, while 14% of women and 17% of men work remotely for more than three days.
The research points out that the working day that extends beyond 5 in the afternoon has also been reduced: in men 62% have it (compared to 71% before the pandemic) and in women, 55% (compared to to 61% by 2020).