Women ‘do 60% more household chores than men’

Women carry out an overall average of 60% more unpaid work than men, according to time use data analysis from the Office for National Statistics.

It finds that on average men do 16 hours a week of unpaid work, which includes adult care and child care, laundry and cleaning, compared to the 26 hours of unpaid work done by women a week.

The only area where men put in more unpaid work hours than women is in the provision of transport – this includes driving themselves and others around, as well as commuting to work.

It states that of all economic groups, mothers on maternity leave do the most unpaid work. That includes 37 hours of active engagement with their child/children, eight hours of cooking, seven hours of housework, two hours of laundry and six hours of transporting themselves or others around.

ONS figures for 2014 show that total unpaid work had a value of £1.01tn, equivalent to approximately 56% of  GDP.

Women do more unpaid work than men in every age group, but 26 to 35 year old women delivered the most unpaid work of any other age category, putting in 34.60 mean hours of unpaid work a week.

The figures also revealed that people on lower incomes tended to carry out, on average, more unpaid work than other income brackets, with some exceptions, such as transport.

For example, those on low incomes spent an average of 5.93 hours per week doing unpaid cooking, compared with 4.98 hours for those on high incomes. Those on low incomes spent an average of 3.78 hours a week doing housework, compared with 3.23 for those on high incomes.

But those on high incomes provided 7.80 hours of free transport per week, compared with 5.43 hours for those on low incomes.

The figures also show that the average amount of time parents devote each day to childcare is down by 5.7% from an average of one hour and 33 minutes per parent in 2000 to one hour and 27 minutes in 2015. Over the same period, the average amount of care provided by people over 60 and siblings increased.

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