Time bandits

Asserts the decreasing working hours of Americans. Comparison of the quantity of hours spent by woman and man on their duties during the 1960s; Reason for the illusion that Americans work so much.

By Marian M. Jones, published on September 01, 1997

The Overworked American. The Second Shift. The Time Bind. Browse the shelvesof your local bookstore and you might think we've become a nation of workaholics. Not so, insist sociologists John P. Robinson and Geoffrey Godbey. In Time For Life: The Surprising Ways Americans Use Their Time (Penn State University Press), they assert that in 1995 Americans worked less than they did 30 years earlier: The average woman put in 31 hours per week, down from 37 in 1965, and the average man worked 40 hours, compared to 46.5 in the mid-60s. And though women still do two-thirds of the child care and housework, men and women come out even when time spent on domestic duties is combined with hours of paid employment.

These findings come from comparisons of time diaries filled out by a cross section of the U.S. population in 1965, 1975, 1985, and 1995. Godbey and Robinson found the diaries to be much more accurate than government surveys, which typically ask people to estimate how many hours they worked the previous week. When posed a similar question and asked to fill out a time diary, study respondents generally overestimated in their answers to the single question.

So why do we have the illusion that we work so much? Most of our increased free time occurs during the work week, in small increments tailor-made for TV. According to the diaries, all of the gains in free time since 1965 have been eaten away by additional TV viewing. More important, surveys show a dramatic increase in the pace of life. Over a third of the U.S. population says it always feels rushed--even retirees and students with 48 hours of free time per week. "We used to think pace and duration went together, that if we worked fewer hours, life would become more leisurely," says Godbey. "But this hasn't proven to be true."

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