OECD: Men have more leisure time
Posted by Elena del Valle on June 1, 2009
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Do you think men and women share equally in the household duties? Do you think they both have the same amount of time free to enjoy activities of their choice? If you said yes you might be surprised by the results of a recent survey of Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) conducted in 18 industrialized countries including the United States. According to researchers, men have more leisure time than women in all of the countries they examined.
The gap between the genders seems to be strongest in Catholic countries. For example, Italian men have 80 minutes more of leisure time than women in their country. Norway, on the other hand, seems to have the greatest gender equality when it comes to leisure time. In that country, men only have a few more minutes of leisure than women. American men have 40 minutes more leisure time per day than women.
What do people do when they have free time? In Mexico and Japan, they spend almost half their leisure time watching TV. People in New Zealand spend less than 25 percent of their leisure time watching the tube. People in Turkey, the most sociable nation, spend 35 percent of their leisure time entertaining friends. In Spain, people spend 13 percent of their time off doing physical activities, making that nation the most active one in that category.
The information was published in the latest edition of Society at a Glance, a publication of the OECD that features an overview of social trends and policy developments in OECD countries relying on indicators from OECD studies and other sources. One of the chapters in the report was dedicated to leisure time in the 18 OECD countries for which up-to-date time-use surveys are available from 2006, and based on nationally representative samples of between 4,000 and 200,000 people.
OECD provides a forum for member governments to compare policy experiences, “seek answers to common problems, identify good practice and coordinate domestic and international policies.”
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