Both Men and Women Do the Work of the World

Sacks is a teacher, a carpenter and a graduate of UCLA.

By Glenn Sacks

During UCLA’s International Women’s Day celebration
earlier this month, women’s studies Professor Christine
Littleton said, “It is women who do the work of the
world” (“Students
celebrate International Women’s Day,” Daily Bruin,
News, March 12). To judge who does “the work of the
world” in a world of over 6 billion people is a gargantuan
task (though Littleton doesn’t seem much burdened by it), but
let’s begin by asking two questions:

1) Who works the most hours (inside or outside the home) in the
average family unit worldwide?

2) Who does the most demanding and dangerous work?

The second question is much easier to answer than the first, so
let’s start there. According to the International Labor
Organization, an estimated 1.1 million workers are killed in
industrial accidents each year, exceeding the number killed from
road accidents, war, violence and AIDS.

These accidents occur primarily in mining, logging, heavy
agricultural labor, construction, fishing, heavy manufacturing and
various other overwhelmingly male jobs.

The ILO estimates that some 600,000 lives would be saved every
year if available safety practices were used. The ILO also
estimates that there are an approximately 250 million occupational
accidents and 160 million occupational diseases each year. The ILO
doesn’t keep figures by gender, but in countries like
England, Australia, Canada, and South Africa, where such figures
are available, the fatalities and serious injuries are usually over
90 percent male.

The gender breakdowns in the U.S. are little different.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were over 125
million workplace injuries in the United States between 1976 and
1999. Nearly 100,000 workers died from job-related injuries between
1980 and 1994 ““ with 95 percent of them male.

Of the 25 most dangerous jobs listed by the U.S. Department of
Labor, all of them are at least 90 percent and are often 100
percent male.

According to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration,
more than three million workers a year are treated in hospital
emergency rooms for occupational injuries and nearly 50 American
workers are injured every minute of the 40-hour work week. On
average, every day 17 die, 16 of them male.

So there is no doubt that the most dangerous and demanding jobs
are done by men, in most if not virtually every society, and that
men shoulder the burden of dangerous labor in the U.S.

Let’s consider the other question: Who works the most
hours (inside or outside the home) in the average family unit
worldwide? It’s a much harder question to answer but, as best
as can be told, the average man is doing at least as much as the
average woman is.

Feminists generally base their claim that women do most of
“the work”on the United Nations 1995 “Human
Development Report,” which was presented at the U.N.
International Women’s Conference in Beijing in 1995. The
report claimed that women do more work than men. It was, of course,
reported uncritically by the U.S. media with headlines such as
“It’s Official: Women Do Work Harder” and
“A Woman’s Work is Never Done.”

But, as U.N. official Terry McKinley said in February 1996, the
U.N. misrepresented the study in several important ways.

For one, the information provided by the U.N. to the press only
applied to countries where women were found to work more hours than
men ““ the countries where men were found to work more hours
than women (roughly 40 percent) were deliberately excluded (Warren
Farrell, “Women Can’t Hear What Men Don’
Say.”)

Moreover, when the data provided by researchers in some
countries (including the U.S.) did not fit the U.N.’s
intention to show that women “do more,” researchers
were asked (in a private communication) to amend their studies.
Researchers were asked to include women’s voluntary community
work as well as hobbies in order to increase women’s
perceived workload.

Researchers were not asked to include these items (or any
others) in men’s labor. As a study of men and women’s
labor, the U.N. findings are worthless.

But, even if one could possibly do an effective study on how
many hours the average man and woman worked (inside and outside the
home, worldwide), a finding that women work more hours would not
mean that women work “harder” or “more”
because the more difficult and dangerous nature of men’s work
would not be accounted for.

While judging the labors of the world ““ most of it
impoverished ““ is practically impossible, it is not nearly as
hard to judge the labor in an advanced, industrial nation. In the
United States, studies have shown that women clearly are not
working more or harder than men.

For example, the U.N.’s survey on the United States showed
that American men work three more hours a week on average than
American women.

Other neutral researchers have come up with similar conclusions,
including the Journal of Economic Literature, which reports that
the average man works five hours more, and the University of
Michigan’s Survey Research Center which puts the disparity at
3.4 more male hours per week.

Feminist surveys, such as the famous Second Shift by Arlie
Hochschild, get “women do more” figures by a variety of
disreputable gimmicks, recounted in great detail in Farrell’s
“Women Can’t Hear What Men Don’ Say.”

Remember, too, that all of these surveys (the serious ones and
the feminist advocacy ones) count only hours ““ a man doing
eight hours of dangerous construction work in the 100-degree heat
is credited with no more than a woman who works in an
air-conditioned office or who, in the comfort and safety of her own
home (and without a supervisor breathing down her neck), cooks
breakfast, takes the kids to school, packs her husband’s
lunch and folds the laundry while chatting on the phone.

Feminists routinely focus blame on men, but the enemy of most of
the women of the world is not the man who works hard to feed his
wife and kids but the grinding poverty that wreaks devastation on
everybody ““ men, women, and children.