How many working hours each gender puts in.
Its no surprise that everyone has to work to make money, and in the United States the standard is that everyone puts in forty hours a week in ordered to be considered a full time worker. What I set out to discover is to identify the relationship between gender and how many hours they tend to put in a week from each state, and from this raised some interesting questions such as what gender spends the most time working in the United States and which spends the least. And in what states is each gender working more and where are they working the least?
To answer this question it was pretty straight forward for what I had to do. First I imported the time use cleaned data which describes how people choose to spend their time in correlation with things like their gender, race, occupation, etc.… From that point I created a pivot table that would average the amount of time each gender spends working and organize it where the gender was the columns and the states were the rows. Once I had my table I could directly graph it, and for the graph I decided to go with a scatter plot where the x-axis were the states and the y-axis being the hours people worked on a scale of 0–50.
Once I created the graph I could clearly see that men tend to work more hours weekly than woman regardless of occupation. And it was revealed that men work more hours in North Dakota, and women work more hours in the District of Columbia. And that men work less hours in New Mexico, and women work less hours in Utah. Not only was I able to answer all of my questions from this analysis but I saw a very clear trend throughout the graph, as it turns out, men work more hours in every single state than women. This is a very clear trend that doesn’t account for anyone’s occupation, race or income.
So why is this the case? In an article from the World Economic Forum, Robby Berman says that “According to Hive, women work 10 percent harder than men in today’s offices. This conclusion is the product of two other statistics. First, both men and women actually complete about 66 percent of their assigned work. However, women are assigned 10 percent more work than men these days — that they achieve the same completion rate tells us that they’re being more industrious.” From this one could say that because women are more productive than men they have to work less, and that could possibly translate to the data that is being represented here. Another possibility to consider here is that there are a number of companies that offer maternity leave but don’t offer paternity leave, resulting in men who have to work more hours. “Over half of employers (55 percent) now offer paid maternity leave, 45 percent offer paid paternity leave and 35 percent provide paid extended family care leave.” Said Allen Smith in an article talking about how more employers are offering paid leave. But from this statistic I don’t think there is much of a correlation as to why we see women working considerably less hours than men.
Truth is there are a number of factors to consider that could contribute to women working less hours weekly than men. But this goes hand in hand with the pay gap between the two genders despite which job they are working. Men don’t get paid more because they work more hours, the math would not add up in that sense because the difference in hours that they work is on average between six and seven hours, that doesn’t account for the twenty percent more money that men make on average. But these findings are particularly helpful to a company because you want to minimize that gap between how many hours men and women are putting in to help create a more equal opportunity environment. And this data could be use to help with maintaining a good amount of labor amongst genders. If men are getting more hours one week give women more the next week to help balance that out, and since women seem to be more productive it would be beneficial to give women the majority of the hours!
Bibliography:
· Berman, Robby. “Women Are More Productive than Men, According to New Research.” World Economic Forum, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/10/women-are-more-productive-than-men-at-work-these-days?te=1&nl=in-her-words&emc=edit_gn_20200620.
· Smith, Allen. “SHRM Research: More Employers Are Offering Paid Leave.” SHRM, SHRM, 30 July 2021, https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/legal-and-compliance/employment-law/pages/more-paid-leave-offered.aspx#:~:text=Over%20half%20of%20employers%20(55,paid%20extended%20family%20care%20leave.