Men have 40mins more leisure time a day than women
IT won’t come as a surprise to the women picking clothes up off the floor, loading the dishwasher and stirring dinner on the stove.
Men, according to official figures, get 40 minutes more than they do every day to put their feet up and relax.
Across the UK, men apparently while away six hours and nine minutes a day on leisure activities. Women, on the other hand, wangle a mere five hours and 29 minutes to themselves, the Office for National Statistics found.
And when it comes to how we choose to enjoy that leisure time, there are marked differences between the sexes.
While many men prefer to play sport or computer games, women are more likely to spend their precious free time catching up with friends and family.
And those wives and girlfriends who complain the men in their lives don’t take on a fair share of household chores may have a point. The ONS report suggests women have less leisure time on their hands because they carry out more unpaid work, such as childcare and cleaning the house.
Professor Margaret Hogg, of Lancaster University Management School, said women still bore ‘prime responsibility for family life’. She added: ‘They also bear much of the burden when it comes to making relationships work between family members, whether it be sorting out an argument or deciding who gets what cereal for breakfast. There is a lot of emotional labour in there.’
Asked about the differences in how the sexes spend leisure time, Professor Hogg said talking was ‘central to how women live’, while men relate better through sport.
But in a sign of our sedentary lifestyles, both men and women spent by far the majority of their time outside work ‘consuming mass media’ – that is watching TV, or listening to music which these days often involves being online. Men, however, still manage to fit in an extra two hours a week in front of the telly. Leisure activities in the study encompassed socialising, resting, sports and eating out, but did not count time spent sleeping and on personal care.
Women in the North West suffer from the biggest gender leisure gap, where men spend an average of seven hours a week more enjoying themselves. Northern Ireland is the only part of the country where men do not have more free time than women.
On average, British men spend two hours a week longer than women enjoying pastimes such as sport and computer games.
The research found women socialised for 75 minutes more than men a week on average, at four hours and 19 minutes compared with a little over three hours for men. The ONS study analysed 2015 data from the UK Harmonised European Time Use Survey.