Using the past couple of years of data from the American Time Use Survey, I simulated a working day for men and women to see how schedules differ. Below shows the results. Each dot represents a person, where cyan represents women and orange represents men.



A Day in the Life of Women and Men This is a simulation, based on data from the American Time Use Survey.

Household care refers to household work, such as cleaning, cooking, and laundry, as well as taking care of others (children, for example). As you might expect, a higher percentage of women than men do this activity throughout the day.

I was kind of surprised that the split for paid work isn’t closer to 50-50. The distribution of women and men is almost the inverse of the distribution for household care. But that seems to make sense, if we assume women tend to reduce work hours to take care of more household responsibilities.

I also expected leisure time to lean more towards men in the evening hours. It did, but not as much as I thought it would. I’ll have to look at that more closely.

Notes