What Gender Differences in Daily Time Use Means for Women in Youth Ministry
New data reveals how unequal loads outside of work are quietly shaping resilience
Pew Research recently released an interactive article that uses data from the American Time Use Survey. It explores how Americans’ daily time use varies across genders and decades of life. While many of the findings echo those of other research I’ve written about before,1 this one breaks it down in some new ways and comes with helpful visuals.
I’m going to focus on the findings for adults in their 20’s to 40’s, since this covers most people in youth ministry. Some of the findings with the biggest differences across genders include:
Women spend more time on housework (41 more minutes per day in their 20’s, 52 more minutes in 30’s and 40’s).
Women spend more time on caregiving (21 more minutes per day in their 20’s, 54 more minutes per day in their 30’s, and 25 more minutes per day in their 40’s).
Men spend more time watching TV (around 20-30 minutes more per day) and relaxing (around 30-45 minutes more per day).
Why does this matter? Because these things can reflect larger patterns that contribute to resilience or burnout.
When, at the end of each day of youth ministry work, a woman comes home and has to spend 40-50 more minutes on housework and 30-50 more minutes caregiving than her male counterpart, while he has more time to watch TV and relax than her, this adds up over time. As I’ve said before — women are juggling more responsibilities and have less time to recharge and pursue things that fulfill them.
Outside of work, the lives of men and women have statistically significant differences, and this is something we need to be aware of as we seek to support the resilience and longevity of women in youth ministry.
See especially this article, commenting on a study that shows that even single, childless women are juggling more than the average man:
Just chiming in here as a dude who's had some discussion with his wife about this sort of thing. This comment is also directed at the 2024 post about women spending more time with household chores. Here's where I'd like to push back some: women (whether because of nature or nurture) are not doing household chores because they are required to, but because (for whatever the variety of motivations are) they choose to.
The data in the 2024 article shows that it's not a result of being a wife or mother or having to care for anyone other than themselves. Single women, no kids, choose to spend 4 more hours of their time on household labor. No one is saying they have to spend that much time on their household chores but themselves: no kids, no lazy husbands... It's their own expectations. For whatever reason, men choose to spend those 4 hours doing other things. The fallacy here (in my opinion) is that women are validated in spending that time in household chores, when perhaps (like men and their watching TV more) they ought to be challenged that they need to spend LESS time on those chores. Perhaps they do the chores for similar "wrong" motivations that men are lazily watching TV.
So, while the work-life balance might be harder for women, the data from the single women no kids shows that it's perhaps due more to their own choices/desires or the expectations they themselves have set on managing household chores than it actually has to do with what actually is required to manage a household.
TLDR: women make the work-life balance harder for themselves with the expectations they have set up prior to being married with kids.