Work-Life Balance is Harder for Women
And there's a lot of data to back this up
I’ve mentioned before that work-life balance can be challenging for both mothers in youth ministry and for single women in youth ministry. (Married women without children, I’m not trying to leave you out… you’re included in this week’s discussion.)
In doing more research on work-life balance, I've come across a lot of data that has been very eye-opening, especially The Free-Time Gender Gap, a report on the differences in free time, household labor, and childcare between men and women.
Go ahead and check it out. It is fire. 🔥
I knew from conversations and general research that working mothers have a much harder time balancing all their duties, because they spend much more time on household labor and childcare than working fathers do. It’s obviously harder to balance a greater load of personal life tasks with work than the, well, lesser loads that fathers bear on average.
But this report shows that the issues persist across all categories of women, regardless of parental or marital status. In fact, if you search through all the data in this report, you’ll see that the hours per week that men and women spend on household labor alone are vastly different. Here’s what the findings look like:
The people in this survey who spend the least amount of time on household labor are married men with kids, at 5 hours per week. The people who spend the greatest amount of time on household labor are married women without kids, at 14.3 hours per week. But the thing that really surprised me was that on average every woman in these categories spent more time on household labor than every man. In other words, it’s not just that mothers have it harder than fathers, it’s that all women have it harder than all men. Take any category of women in this chart, and they spend more time on household labor than any category of men in the chart.
And we’re not talking like 30 minutes more of household labor per week. The category of women that spend the least amount of time on household labor per week was single women, at 10.6 hours per week… which is still over 4 hours more per week than the men who do the most household labor per week.
And this isn’t even diving into the differences in hours spent in childcare. The married men with kids spent an average of 4.7 hours per week, whereas married women with kids spent an average of 9 hours per week caring for children. (And lest you think that we’re comparing men who work with full time with women who work less than full-time, the report also states that full-time working fathers spend an average of 11.4 hours per week on childcare and household labor combined, while full-time working mothers spend an average of 19 hours per week on these.)
In all, women have 13% less free time than men — although when you break it down by categories, it sometimes is worse. Young women (ages 18-24), for instance, have 20% less free time than men their age.
No matter how you split it, women are juggling more of these responsibilities than men, and they have less time to recharge and pursue things that fulfill them.
When it comes to women in the church and work-life balance, one of the things I think about is that churches often expect more of their staff than is actually healthy — expecting them to give more than 40 hours per week and be available whenever needed, leaving much less time for personal life tasks and pursuits.
The majority of women I know in youth ministry report to a male supervisor, often a pastor. When determining what’s realistic to expect of his direct reports, he might naturally assume that work-life balance looks similar for women as it does for men.
Perhaps if he’s married with children, he does recognize that women tend to take on more household labor and childcare, and he would take that into consideration for any mothers in ministry that he supervises.
But then I think about the single women being supervised by men in the church. These men may just assume that single women have it as easy as he did when he was younger and single. According to this survey, that would be a false assumption. Single women have less free time and spend far more time in household tasks than young guys ever did.
For the women in ministry who are juggling so much between work and life, and who are working with men who don’t quite get it, I think I just want to give you permission (and the data) to say, in the words of Tom Petty, “You don’t know what it’s like to be me.”1
On a similar note, this is also one of the large reasons that women deal with burnout more often.
