According to a recent report in the New York Times, the rising class of unemployed men spend their waking weekdays quite differently from unemployed women.
According to the study both non-working men and women spend significantly more time sleeping than their counterparts who work – on average, “the prime-age nonemployed spend slightly over an hour more sleeping than their employed counterparts,” writes Josh Katz – but beyond the commonalities lie several gendered differences.
Men, for instance, spend a strikingly greater amount of time watching television and movies than do women in the same boat – more than double the figures for women, in fact. Out of the 65 people studied by the Times who devoted more of their daytime to watching TV and movies than any other activity listed in the survey, 46 are men versus 19 who were women.
Unemployed women, on the other hand, were more likely to report spending a greater percentage of their weekday hours caring for others, socializing and performing house work chores like cleaning and doing laundry.
“About one-fifth of nonworking women spend a majority of their day caring for someone else. Nearly all of the women in this group have children,” according to the Times.
Another notable differential in the ways each sex’s American unemployed spent their time relates to education. Men reported spending substantially more time – about twice as many male members of the sample group studied in the report said that they spent at least 10 percent of their day educating themselves as did the group’s female respondents.
