Gender inequality persists in multitasking: Study

NEW YORK - Men may be helping more in the home, but working women still do more multitasking in US families than their partners and are finding it stressful, according to a new study.

Whether it is housework, cooking or childcare, women do about 10 hours more multitasking in the home each week - 48.3 hours compared to 38.9 hours for men. Researchers said the difference constitutes an important source of gender inequality. "When you look at men and women in similar kinds of work situations they look very similar," said Barbara Schneider, a professor of sociology at Michigan State University and a co-author of the study.

"But when they come home it is very clear that women are shouldering much more of the responsibilities of housework and childcare."

Schneider and Shira Offer, an assistant professor at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, used data from the 500 Family Study, which looked at how families in eight US urban and suburban communities balance work and family life.

Their research is based on responses from a subset of 368 mothers and 241 fathers in dual-income families, which they said reflects the most time-pressured segment of the population. "This (the findings) suggests that working mothers are doing two activities at once more than two-fifths of the time they are awake, while working fathers are multitasking more than a third of their waking hours," Schneider said.

Reuters