Work and Leisure

Gender, work and leisure 75worked long hours in paid employment tended to be in lower skill, lowerstatus and lower paid occupations: but those in higher status occupationswere equally disadvantaged in terms of perception and support for theirfamily responsibilities, as well as in their needs for leisure. However, althoughtheir numbers may be growing, other research indicates that there is a continuedproblem of unequal pay. In a report from the Women’s Unit of theUK Cabinet Office in 2000, it was estimated that the ‘gender earnings gap’(the difference in men’s and women’s earnings which could not be attributedto motherhood) was worth just below a quarter of a million pounds for amid-skilled woman over her lifetime. For women with two children, inmid-skilled occupations, the loss was an additional £140,000 (Cabinet Office2000). The pay gap remains as wide as it did in the 1960s when Greer analysedthe situation in The Female Eunuch. In 1999, men in full-time employmentin the United Kingdom earned on average £23,000 a year, while womenin full-time employment earned £16,000.All of the eleven women interviewed by Tess Kay experienced inequalityin their home, work and leisure: not only were they conscious of it, but alsothey were dissatisfied with it. Some of them had taken steps to redress theimbalances, such as the allocation of selected tasks to their partners. Atother times, the women had used less deliberate action and the sheer practicalitiesof the activities of the household made it inevitable that there weresome changes in responsibilities. However, the women felt that thesechanges were slight and the impact limited, and they were frustrated byprevailing gender ideologies in their attempts to negotiate more satisfactoryagreements. The overall feelings of the group were that ‘at the heart ofthe inequitable distribution of paid and unpaid work lies leisure’ (Kay1998: 13).So by the end of the 1990s, not only had attitudes not shifted significantlycompared with the reported outcomes from professional working wives andmothers interviewed in the Sheffield study, the clarity of their understandingof the differences between men and women in their perceptions of responsibilitiesfor the family and of the individual rights to leisure had not dimmed.Progress seemed to be almost non-existent since the 1970s. As one woman inKay’s study said:I think attitudes towards leisure differ between men and women. Themore I think about it the more I think we are different species from thesame planet! I think men are much better at prioritising and saying Iwant this for me, so I’ll walk out of this home and do this, than womenare. I read a quote in a magazine which I found really true and interesting:women do all that they have to do, and then make time for themselveswith what is left; men do what they want to do for themselves andthen everything has to fit in around that. I think that is true, women doeverything they have to do for other people and what is left, even if it is