I haven’t read much WSJ in a while, but the first thing I come across is this:
“So what do Indian men do for most of their day? Answer: Eat, sleep, watch television and listen to the radio. That’s right: The average Indian man spends more than 11 hours a day on what OECD describes as personal care — mostly sleeping, eating and drinking.” (some ChickenTikka person took the time to write this?)
I sometimes wonder about these “help out around the house” studies. Primarily because I think one reason women do more housework is that they have more demanding standards for what the house should look and feel like. Men tend to see the home as a place to crash and relax and store their stuff, whereas women tend to see the home as the expression of their personality, and spend time worried about what others will think if they see it out of order. As a result, women probably do substantially more housework even when they live by themselves than men do when they live by themselves. Somehow, that’s got to enter the equation, too, otherwise, the study concludes “men don’t work enough to maintain the house to women’s standards.” The standards need to be set jointly in an equitable situation.
When it comes to child-rearing, I think there is a bigger case to be made about making sure fathers do their part. And a man who views or treats his wife as a kind of domestic servant is definitely a problem.
It also seems strange to me that “sleep” is in a category defined as “preening.” I don’t feel that I preen in my sleep, and sleep is definitely more necessary than watching sports on tv or listening to the radio (are these also considered “preening”?).
Finally, it sounds like Indian men are the “worst” on this strange scale, but by how much? Is it substantially worse than everyone else, or did they just happen to be on the bottom - someone’s got to be on the bottom.
There are a lot of things about how things are done in India that I might take issue with, but there are so many things that seem fishy about this study that I can’t take it very seriously…
And to isildurr, I don’t think Ohai necessarily agrees with the conclusions of every article he posts. He just enjoys being a bit provocative, and it generally promotes interesting discussion. This is one of the more potentially incendiary topics, admittedly, but - so far - nothing has incended.
If they work 24% of their time, that’s still 40 hours a week. I’m not sure that, on average, a North American works that much when you consider the underemployed/unemployed. Especially if you’re factoring in young people that are spending time in classes/school or whatever too. Those numbers don’t look shocking.
I don’t question the results of the study with respect to Indian gender roles. Is it surprising that Indian women do more housework compared to women in other cultures? What I found interesting was the response to the study, which parallels certain attitudes and sentiments that can be found elsewhere (on AF, for instance).
The survey data can be found in an Excel file that is available through a link on the BB response article. There are some interesting observations. For instance, both Canadian men and women apparently spend more time on “Paid work or study” than their US counterparts. However, they are still 10% below the Chinese and 19% below the Japanese.
Other perhaps surprising results: The Chinese spend the most time sleeping. People in Turkey volunteer the most. Koreans spend half as much time shopping as Americans, despite what I was told by “Gangnam Style”. Yet, there is no Op Ed about any of these more interesting results.
Edit: I apologize if you think that this post was meant to provoke certain categories of people. I believe that legitimate observations should be viewed objectively and undefensively, including observations on myself, as I am actually a rather weird person. If people are provoked by a legitimate observation, perhaps that is an opportunity for some humorous self reflection.
I like many of your posts, Ohai, and we don’t have to agree with them in order for them to be interesting to think or talk about. I don’t assume that you agree with every article you post here, and in fact this thread had both an article and a response.
This particular theme was just more prone to slide down a slippery slope into name calling and stereotyping. So far it hasn’t done that yet (except about Canadians, eh?). We shall see.
I’m a weird person too. “Eccentric” is probably a better term for me.