You Won't Believe How Much More Time Women Spend at Work Than Men
As if staying late at the office wasn't bad enough, let this sink in: You'll likely work 13 minutes longer than your male peers today and every day, according to a new report. And it gets worse when you move beyond the United States. In other parts of the world, women are averaging 50 minutes more work than men each day for a whopping 39 additional work days every calendar year.
That's the latest from the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report 2016, which came with even more depressing news: The global gap between women and men—from the loathsome pay gap to political under-representation and even the number of STEM program graduates—won't close for another 170 years.
Last year's report estimated we'd close the gender gap by 2133. Now, it's 2186. To say we've moved in a very wrong direction would be a serious understatement.
Of course, in the U.S., which is shamefully ranked 45th of 144 countries measured in the gender gap report, we have it a little better at work than some other countries. In India, Portugal, and Estonia, for instance, women work an average of 50 days more than their male peers. Even in the U.K., women work an average of 16 minutes more each day than men, which amounts to 12 days more each year. By comparison, the extra 13 minutes we work each day in the U.S. amounts to a little more than 10 days each year.
What's worse, that's just time logged at the office (or wherever you do your day job) that you're supposed to be paid. It doesn't include the countless hours women spend doing unpaid work, such as childcare and household chores. Women in the U.S. do 50 minutes of unpaid work each day, compared to 32 minutes of unpaid work done by men, for an 18-minute-a-day gap. But in, say, Turkey, that gap widens to 51 minutes each day, with women doing 75 minutes of unpaid work compared to the 24 minutes done by men.
Though implementing a major societal upheaval to bring forth gender equality may be a hard task for one person, there are simple ways you can close your own, personal gap: Take those vacation days you've been saving up since spring, get ready to negotiate a raise at your upcoming yearly review, and for goodness sake, make your partner do the dishes tonight.