Men spend more time commuting than women. But they tend to just travel. ..
… Co-author and economist Professor Jennifer Roberts, from the University of Sheffield, told The Guardian: “We know that women, especially those with children, are more likely to add daily errands to their commute, such as food shopping and dropping off and picking up children from childcare.
“These time constraints and the reduced flexibility that comes with them make commuting stressful in a way that it wouldn’t be otherwise.”
The research, called It’s driving her mad: Gender differences in the effects of commuting on psychological health, is published today in the Journal Of Health Economics, and found that women with pre-school age children were affected the most.
For them, the psychological impact of commuting was four times greater than it was for men with pre-school children.
An interesting UK study isn’t it? Also interesting is the spin the Courier Mail gave it in its reporting:
IT’S no fun for anyone but the daily grind of travelling to and from work is seriously affecting women’s mental health.
That’s because women can’t help but multi-task.
Can’t help but multi-task or forced to multi-task? Talk about tripping over the patriarchal elephant in the room.
This ranty post on what was my own commute to work versus Bill’s commute remains one of my most popular posts ever. Things have improved greatly since then in terms of sharing the load between us but I still have some killer commutes to work, including one morning a week that involves four separate drop-offs before I finally arrive at the office.
(Thanks also to the very lovely Tasmiya for sending me the article link).
Yep. Now that my youngest child is almost 17, I look back at all the picking up/dropping off of children plus the errands that I used to run, often on icy roads in the winter, and I remember how exhausting it all was.
“Can’t help but multitask.” WTF????
I don’t actually do much multitasking in my commutes, and my husband and I have a very equitable arrangement right now (he drops off, I pick up)… but that still pisses me off.
Dude, the groceries have to get bought. The errands have to get done. Someone’s got to do them. And if you want to be sure you don’t have to multitask on the commutes, someone’s got to organize the crap out of the home life.
(Organize the crap out of our home life is what we do, but that may be because a project manager/database designer type married a software engineer/architect type… let’s just say NOT planning would be harder for us than planning.)
And I still say that the time between day care pick up and dinner is the hardest part of my day.
Extraneous errands on a drop off day send me right over the edge. So- happily I no longer do it thanks to Grandma. She truly is supreme for coming to my house so I can get to work in a less stressful manner.
Spouse & I did split the task though- it was the only way since we work opposite shifts.
I do find myself using my dinner hour at work to run errands, and it can be stressful; so I try to limit that. The key is being organized which is a challenge for me.
Nice blog! Will be back 🙂
“Just” dropping into the supermarket on the way home from day care. Get to daycare, say hello to child, collect bag, quick chat to carers about the day, check if toddler wants to go to the toilet, check parent notices, walk to car carrying toddler, strap toddler into car seat, drive to supermarket, unstrap toddler, carry into supermarket, lift into supermarket trolley seat, find your way up and down the aisles, interrupt for 10 minutes to take toddler to the toilet, get to checkout, queue up, pay for groceries, take groceries and toddler to car, return trolley to bay, carry toddler back to car, strap toddler in, drive off with the flippin’ Wiggles on repeat play, get home late….
I’m like Cloud in that my husband and I share drop off and pick ups and pretty much everything else really well. It’s always been that way. So I’m really curious about the clear majority of couples where male and female partners don’t share the load well- including Blue Milk in the days of the ranty commute post. How exactly does that happen? Is it a case of “I’ll do it because that’s what you do”, or “it just worked out like that” or “he won’t do it” or “my job is more flexible (or so I’m told) “. Just to be clear, I think all of these cases equate to “forced to multi-task”. For us at least, where some inequality has developed it’s mostly been through a kind of snowball effect from when our kids were infants and I was much more involved in their care than he was.
Sharing drop-offs and pick-ups may not be possible, and / or sensible, depending on where the childcare centre is located in relation to home, and to each person’s workplace. And the snowball builds from there…
oh what a perfectly timed post. I have just started a new job and had my first day in at the office today and was already thinking “grrr…I can’t believe how much I have to pack into my commute.” I drop off and pick up child from nursery and we cycle there so I do it in a suit (annoying and uncomfortable). Then I cycle to train station where it is a 1.5 hour commute. Then repeat backwards.
The reason it falls on me is that I am now an academic so for now (before teaching starts) my job is more flexible. But it also means I have to work until midnight every night after the child has gone to sleep.
I also buy groceries in my lunch hour and then lug them on the train.
I used to try to buy groceries after I picked up the child from nursery but it was a nightmare – she was just too tired and wanted to go home (fair enough). So I try to buy them either during the day or before I pick her up. I am also thinking about getting them delivered.
Am also thinking about leaving my suit at work and changing and putting on makeup once I get there. It saves looking completely dishevelled before I even get to the office. Anyone else do that?
Not me (I’m the bus person in my relationship) but my partner the cyclist has his work wardrobe stored in his office filing cabinet. Saves on the dishevelled and on washing, and means he can more easily wear cycling clothing appropriate for the weather.
It seems to me that if you’re having to stay up until midnight to get your work done, your job may not actually be more flexible than your partner’s. But of course, only you and your partner know this for certain. Perhaps you should do a thought experiment: what would the drop off or pick up routine be for your partner? Could it work?
Karen L has just left some comments over on my blog that have me thinking about the assumptions about flexibility. (OK, I was thinking about this already, prompted by a cousin who switched careers from a supposedly family-friendly teaching career partially because she didn’t actually find it family friendly.)
Anyway, there was a quote in this article that she linked to that I think is really interesting:
“In her study, she was struck by how often the wife’s job was seen by both spouses as being more flexible than the husband’s. By way of example she describes two actual couples, one in which he is a college professor and she is a physician and one in which she is a college professor and he is a physician. In either case, Deutsch says “both the husband and wife claimed the man’s job was less flexible.” ”
Anyway, on the practical things: I don’t know about leaving a suit at the office since I drive (and don’t wear a suit), but I do have some colleagues who cycle in, and they mostly shower and change once they get here.
My husband and I have tried having groceries delivered, and that wasn’t a huge help for us, but getting the random drugstore stuff and other odds and ends we’d usually buy at Target delivered has been a big time saver. We grocery shop once a week, on weekends. We go to Target less than once a month now. Any other shopping happens during bath time- one parent does the bath while the other runs out and does the shopping.
Thanks for these comments. They are really insightful. I think you are right – there is this assumption that my job is more flexible but I do end up working late to fit it all in. It is frustrating because when I am working from home in the evenings my husband will still expect me to do things around the house even though I had to leave work at 4pm (he leaves at 6/6:30pm) and thus had 2.5 hours fewer hours to do my job (plus having got to worker later).
And there was definitely a lot more pressure on me to find a job that was more flexible (hence going into academia, which is terribly paid compared to private practice for hours that can be just as long).
My husband thinks that it is easier for women to ask for flexi-time than men. When he asks to leave work early to pick up the child he is often mocked as though he is using her as an excuse to leave work early.
I get frustrated though when he says that it is easier for women to ask for flexi-time. If it were, women wouldn’t be suffering the career and income disadvantages that we do. I don’t think it is easier to ask – it is just that we HAVE to ask.
What works well for us is that my husband does drop off and I do pick up. He gets to work at about 9, and leaves at about 5:30. I get to work at about 8 and leave at about 4:30. We both occasionally log on again at night- usually after the kids are asleep, but for me (since right now bedtimes are hitting me harder), sometimes he takes the kids after dinner and I do a little bit of work before and during bathtime.
We organized the drop off/pick up thing this way to decrease the time in day care (which I no longer think is that important, but really mattered to us in the early days) and because I hate the tears at drop off, when they happen (rare, these days). But I could see that another consequence of this is that my husband is seen as working later and has a much easier time staying truly late when he needs/wants to. Perhaps that would help your husband with the face time issue he’s dealing with? My husband and I both work in fields where it is pretty easy to see productivity, so the face time thing isn’t such a big deal to us, but in cases where it is, I think staying late gets more cred than coming in early.
It sounds to me like you are NOT happy with the status quo, so I’d encourage you to negotiate with your husband for a better arrangement. He does drop offs. Or he does more of the evening childcare so that you can get your work done without staying up super late. Or something.
I know, though, that this is easier said than done. I can’t really say why it hasn’t been much of an issue for me and my husband- we both assumed that we’d both be contributing around the house equally, and we do. We still argue about it sometimes, but it is as likely to be because he thinks I’m slacking as the other way around. I wish I could deconstruct how our relationship got this way, because I know that a lot of women would love to have my arrangement. I don’t know, though. All I can come up with is that I’ve always made more money than him, and we’ve both always thought of our careers as equally important. Whether those two are linked, and whether or not the money aspect is important, though I don’t know.
I think “easier” translates as “society assumes that women with children will slack off on their jobs, so women start paying the price for flex-time before they actually ask for it. Thus asking produces less of a detectable change”. That and “women fuss so much but it doesn’t really mean anything, so if a woman and a man both say ‘my boss was angry’, her boss must have been less angry”.
Not to pick on your husband, and if you were being mocked you would have said so. But ‘more flexible’ isn’t the same as ‘less work’ and if you’re staying up til midnight to finish work, but he isn’t, you’re paying a high price to pick up the kid.
And if ‘my job is more flexible’ means that as an academic, you don’t have a fixed schedule, so you can skimp on work hours and it won’t affect your career until it keeps you from getting tenure or promotions or whatever … then skimping work to pick up the kid isn’t doing you or your child any favors.
oh lordy, just saw the comments below the Guardian article. How utterly depressing. What is it about talking about issues affecting women that bring out the worst in some men?
One thing about Blue Milk’s rant post that struck me was that your/her timetable had him leaving home before she did and returning afterwards. So I assumed BM was working part time – is that right? Otherwise he’s putting in either a really long commute or some silly hours at work.
I don’t have kids, and the people I know with kids seem to split things up in fairly interesting ways. Different from the unhappy people – one couple work three days a week each and his mother looks after the baby on the crossover day. Baby is going into daycare soon. One guy I worked with was about to take a years (unpaid) paternity leave, the deal they had was she did the first year of baby-wrangling then he did the second. He was also the grocery-buyer while she was baby-caring, and I suspect he did more than that. On the other hand, I work with a bunch of men in suits who never seem to take time off for kid-related reasons…
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