Work and Leisure

94 Chris Gratton and Peter TaylorTable 5.4 Proportion of men and women who wish to reduce their working hours, UK,1995Work time quintiles% ofwomen% ofmenGross incomequintiles% ofwomen% ofmenLowest 6 13 Lowest 9 11Second 23 17 Second 24 25Third 43 29 Third 41 31Fourth 49 38 Fourth 50 41Highest 57 50 Highest 57 43Whole sample 28 35 Whole sample 28 35Source: British Household Panel Survey (Gershuny 1996)time. Clearly, even in this sample known to work long hours for years, worktime is not always a matter of choice.Gershuny (1996) reports evidence to show that there is a clear preference ofthose working the longest hours to reduce their working hours. Some 57 percent of women in the top 20 per cent of income earners and of working hourswanted to reduce their working hours in 1994–5. Table 5.4 shows that as peoplemove up the hierarchy of either income or working hours the preference forreducing working hours grows. The preference for reducing working hours inTable 5.4 rises more steeply for women than for men. Part of the reason forhigher preferences of women for shorter working hours may be the length oftime they also spend on domestic unpaid work outside the workplace.Unpaid workGershuny (1997) shows that although there has been a slight reduction inwomen’s housework (cleaning, clothes washing, and cooking) time since1961, there has been a sharp rise in time spent on shopping and domestictravel and perhaps more surprisingly, a massive rise in the amount of timeboth women and men spend on childcare. Even though family size hasdeclined, Gershuny’s evidence suggests that childcare time has almostdoubled for both men and women in every category. He found that full-timeemployed women with children in 1995 appeared to devote more time tochildren than even non-employed mothers did in 1961.Gershuny explains the rise in shopping and domestic travel time as due tothe replacement of local shops by huge self-service stores in out-of-town sitesthat involve less cost to the retailers but more time from shoppers. He alsodiscusses the reasons for the rise in childcare time:Children use all sorts of personal services – educational, medical, recreational– and as the scale of these facilities grows, their location becomeson average more distant from the child’s own home. To these increasingly