The Leisure Gap

On a Saturday in July I watched two parents at a lake. He was lying on a towel with a book. She was sitting upright on the next towel, a paperback open on her knee, looking at the water where their two children were. In forty minutes I didn't see her turn a page.

If anyone had asked them later how they'd spent the afternoon, they would have given the same answer. We went to the lake and read. Only one of them did.

The quantity gap

The simplest finding first. In most rich countries, men have more free time than women. The OECD's How's Life report, published this year, pulls together national time-use surveys and finds that working-age women spend around two hours a day more on unpaid work than men on average. Men spend more time in paid work. Add the two together and the totals are close in some countries and lopsided in others.

The surveys come from different years, so the comparisons are rough. But the direction is consistent enough that it has stopped being a surprise to anyone who studies it.

The quality gap

The more interesting finding is older and gets cited less. In 2003, the sociologists Marybeth Mattingly and Suzanne Bianchi looked at American time diaries and asked what free time was actually like, not just how much of it people had.

Men had more of it. And women's free time was more often what the researchers called contaminated: shared with children, broken up by other tasks, or done alongside something else. Marriage and children widened the gap. A woman reading at the lake while watching the water is, in a time diary, at leisure. In her body, she is at work.

This is the part of the leisure gap that a simple count of hours misses. Two people can each have an hour off. One of them gets an hour. The other gets sixty minutes of being slightly on duty.

When I asked women to describe a day off that felt like a day off, very few mentioned spas or holidays. Most described an afternoon when someone else was in charge and they knew it. One said the best rest of her year was a dentist appointment, because for forty minutes nobody could ask her anything.

Why it matters more than it sounds

Psychologists who study recovery from work, much of it associated with Sabine Sonnentag and her colleagues, keep returning to one principle. People recover when they detach mentally from their obligations, not just physically. Sitting still while still responsible doesn't do the same job.

That research is mostly about paid employment, and I'm stretching it by applying it to family life. But the stretch doesn't feel large. If rest requires being off the hook, then a person who is never quite off the hook never quite rests, however many hours she spends sitting down.

It's the same weight I wrote about in The Reminder Tax. The monitoring doesn't stop because the task stopped. It follows her to the lake.

Men's free time has its own pressures, and I don't want to pretend otherwise. Long hours and commutes eat into it. But when he is off, he tends to be fully off, and that difference compounds over years.

What would close it

The fix isn't more hours off, or not only that. It's hours that are actually off. Time when someone else is fully responsible for the children, the dinner and whatever goes wrong, and she knows it, and doesn't have to check.

The father at the lake could have offered that with one sentence. I've got them. Then he'd have had to mean it, which would have meant putting the book down.

At around four o'clock, one of the children cut a foot on a stone. The mother was up before the crying started. The father finished his paragraph first.