Why do men work more hours than women?

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 per week in order 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 by performing this analyzation it had 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? And why would a specific gender be spending more time working and what correlations are of significant importance to that causality?

To answer these questions, I imported a data set that describes how people choose to spend their time in the United States by state with variables like gender and working hours, along with how much time people spend watching television, the amount of education people have, what kind of homes people live in and many other variables. To answer one of our questions was actually relatively easy, all I had to do was average the number of “working hours” for each gender by the state and then plot it accordingly. The graph you see below is the result of that, and I chose to go with a scatter plot because I felt like it displayed all of the values in a very clear way and could easily identify the trends despite my not so clear x-axis. The x-axis here is showing the states, but this is not too relevant to the overall message, and on the y-axis we of course have the number of hours people spend working.

I did not think that a trend line would be necessary here because of how obvious the separation between how many hours men work versus the amount of hours that women work regardless of occupation. After further analysis I could also see 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.

But despite those statistics the overall messages is that despite what state you may or may not live in, men will work more hours than women. This analysis is unbiased to anyone’s occupation, race, or income. In the chart above I created a dot chart that has a number of dimensions to it to see if I could begin to identify if there was anything that was influencing why women would work less hours than men on a weekly basis. And as you can see that there does not seem to be any time of relationship that ties in state, occupation, or education. Since the dots are all over the place, I figured I would have to take it a step further.

So I thought the next logical step would be to take and compare the correlation coefficients between all of the values within the dataset I had. To visualize this I created a heat map that would show us visually where there would be strong correlations and where there would be weak correlations. And although there are other variables within the dataset like gender they are listed as either “Male” or “Female, or like household type would be listed as “House” or “Apartment” and the system cant compare values like that and identify a correlation between “Female” and “House” for example, so we are left with these remaining values to compare. A relationship that has a correlation coefficient close to +1 or -1 will mean that there is either a strong positive relationship or that there is a strong negative relationship. So from our heat map what strong relationships do we have if any? One of the stronger relationships that we see is between “Age” and “TV”, but this comes to no surprise, as the older you get the more time you have to watch television. There also seems to be a strong relationship between “Children at home” and “Household size”, this too should also come as no surprise because the more people you have under one roof the larger the house will need to be. And lastly we see that there is a strong negative correlation between “Age” and “Children at home”, the older you get the less people there are in your home which is sad to think about but the reality of things. But none of this actually seems to shed light onto our previous finding which was why the massive gap in the amount of hours that men and women work.

From my analysis this dataset does not hold the answer as to why there is a gap in the amount of hours that men and women work. So I had to go digging elsewhere to answer my question, this lead me to a number of articles. 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.

There are a number of factors to consider that could contribute to women working less hours weekly than men. And that’s why we might see so many correlations that show that they don’t have a causal relationship with the number of hours each gender works. But this goes hand in hand with the pay gap between the 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 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 maintain a good amount of labor amongst genders. If men are getting more hours one week give women more the next week to balance that out, and since women seem to 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.