Occupations, Leisure, & their Externalities
Work is a driving force in our lives, it pays the bills, gives purpose, and adds structure to someone’s day. Different occupations contribute differently to the roles as to how far these parameters impact one’s life as well as other external forces such as having a family which may push people to pursue a certain occupation. This raises the question, what occupations have workers see the most hours in a week, and are there different externalities that influence these behaviors, or is it more so related to the line of work? Is there a pattern between different occupations? How does leisure correlate with their work life? Through analysis, this is what I sought to uncover.
At an initial glance at the data of 22 broadscale occupations, we can see that Management occupations tend to work the longest hours, at approximately 45 hours a week. We can infer this is because of the demanding position it takes to take charge of different workers as well as trying to organize and maintain an operation. Furthermore, we can see Legal, Protective, and Repair occupations follow with 43 hours a week on average, from this we can also infer that the high weekly average is due to the long hours required to do civil service as well as a constant demand for repairs and the trades. Looking even deeper to the tail end of our data we can see Food Preparation and Service have an average of 32 working hours a week. We can speculate that this is because most restaurants and diners have limited times when they are open and operating.
On another level when looking into the data we can look to see if there is a correlation between work hours and the number of children in the household. When looking at the data we can see that the number of hours worked has some overlap in regards to the number of children at home, especially with Management occupations ranking #13/22 when it has the highest average working hours. This drop makes sense when looking objectively at the data when long work averages are present it makes it difficult to balance work while also taking care of a family. We also found that most of the jobs that have an on average lower weekly working schedule do actually tend to have a higher average number of children at home, we can see this is especially present in the Foodservice as well as the Healthcare occupations.
Looking even deeper we can separate the working hours between workers from Male and Female to see if there is a correlation between gender and kids at home allowing us to see if there are any trends in the data or outliers. At an initial glance, we can see that males in Management occupations tend to work on average 47 hours which is the largest weekly average of work of any occupation. This may also play a role in the drop in average kids at home as well as the high average of working hours. We can also see that occupations that have large rates of children at home also tend to have lower working hours, usually correlating with females but also seeing a drop in average hours for men in those same occupations. A key contrast is male and female workers in healthcare seeing that on average males in the occupation work 9 more hours than females in the occupation. In the context of our understanding of Healthcare professionals having a high average of children at home, we can infer this is because most females are taking care of the children on top of working.
By analyzing how workers relax on their own time we can gain another level of understanding and context, we can use each occupation’s average time spent in front of the TV as an identifier as to how workers unwind after a long day and relax. Looking at the mean of total minutes across occupations we can see that many labor-intensive jobs tend to correlate with high screen time which can be deduced because of how physically intensive these jobs are. It is interesting to see that the deviation between the top three is so close with a deviation of only 1 minute leaving them all in the range of 167 minutes. We can also see a trend as more jobs that are heavily related to the trades and labor all have on average 160 and above daily minutes. To once again highlight the healthcare practitioner occupations we can use this understanding to support our claim that workers are taking care of kids at home or spending their time in other forms of recreation and leisure.
To circle back, the occupations, choices, and lives we lead outside of work all flow back inwards into themselves, the kind of jobs we work helps to discern how we spend our leisure time. External features such as children at home also play a role in work-life balance and how long people are working and spending time at home. All these aspects of life help to give us the drive to find work that suits us and ultimately balance, between work and life, and understanding these aspects big and small helps us to better understand our purpose, give us drive, and keep us focused on what we do it all for.
