In today’s Times. You’ll have seen these arguments around here before:

Another day, another report telling us that we’re all working our fingers to
the bone. Yes, again, the longest working hours in Europe, no time for
family life – the difference this time being that the survey came from the
the Children’s Society Good Childhood Inquiry, which allows the further
anguished cry of “Won’t somebody think of the children”?

Sigh. The only problem with these oft-repeated tropes is that they are tripe.
The most important statistic on the matter is that we do not work more hours
than our forefathers: we have vastly more leisure time than they did and in
the absence of there being more hours in the day we must therefore be
working less. A recent US Federal Reserve Bank study, for instance, showed
that the average American man had 6-8 hours more leisure time a week, and
women 4-8 hours, compared with 1965. The bank’s findings are backed up by
countless other surveys.

The reason for the confusion is that most commentators look only at paid
working hours and these have indeed increased for women over the past
century as more women have entered the labour force. But unpaid working
hours in the home have fallen, largely as a result of technology: we’ve just
had the 40th anniversary of that marvellous time saver, the microwave oven,
and who would return to the mangle rather than the washing machine?

Of course, you could claim that such household management is not work –
although I would advise you not to say it within hearing of someone who has
to do it: I certainly wouldn’t assert such a thing within frying pan reach
of my mother.

So the net effect for women has been a reduction in total working hours. For
men the picture is even rosier: both paid and unpaid working hours have
fallen. There is, on average, no gender imbalance either: the Office for
National Statistics reports that working hours for men and women differ by
no more than a few minutes a day when both paid and unpaid work are
included.

So if working hours have fallen and continue to do so, with both men and women
benefiting, what actually is the complaint? Perhaps it is that other
Europeans work even fewer hours than we do. But as the economist Ronald
Schettkat, of Utrecht University, has pointed out, this is not true either:
with paid and unpaid work included, German women actually slave an hour and
a half each week more than those Stakhanovites, American women.

What is happening is that Britons and Americans are choosing to work outside
the home in order to have less of a burden at home. Our actions show we
would rather earn more money to pay someone else to fulfil those boring
household duties, or to purchase better labour-saving devices, or buy
convenience food. As that is a free choice, this is obviously what we prefer
– and such division of labour makes us all richer to boot.