Men Lose Life Satisfaction with Fewer Hours in Employment: Mothers Do Not

Not buying it. I'll take the extra free time, thank you very much. You know, actually... I'd probably use it for some form of "self-directed" employment anyway.

But I'd still take 6 hours working for the man and 4 working for myself, rather than 40 hrs+ a week for somebody else.

Anectodal, but for me it was great working 25 hours a week. I had plenty of time for myself, learned a lot, went biking and running a lot, and eventually even completely changed my life by using the time to pivot into a different career path. Now I work 40-45 hours a week, and am waaay less happy. I even plan on going down to 32 hours a week from the 1st of April.

"women and especially mothers are more satisfied with life when their male partners work longer" this bit made me chuckle

I'm just going to make this up and guess that mothers and women would have the same reaction as men IF the reduction of work hours left them with spare time.

We are dealing with averages here so just going by averages women spend a huge amount of time on non-work household tasks whereas on average men don't. My theory is therefore that women would find a maximum level of satisfaction if they had enough time for non-work tasks + work. And that their satisfaction would be reduced if they had too much time.

Or another totally different theory. Men find satisfaction in our jobs because they distract us from all the other things that we don't want to do. Like cleaning, diy tasks, exercise, or seeing a doctor about that long-term issue.

Full title: Men Lose Life Satisfaction with Fewer Hours in Employment: Mothers Do Not Profit from Longer Employment—Evidence from Eight Panels

Abstract:

"""

This article uses random and fixed effects regressions with 743,788 observations from panels of East and West Germany, the UK, Australia, South Korea, Russia, Switzerland and the United States. It shows how the life satisfaction of men and especially fathers in these countries increases steeply with paid working hours. In contrast, the life satisfaction of childless women is less related to long working hours, while the life satisfaction of mothers hardly depends on working hours at all. In addition, women and especially mothers are more satisfied with life when their male partners work longer, while the life satisfaction of men hardly depend on their female partners’ work hours. These differences between men and women are starker where gender attitudes are more traditional. They cannot be explained through differences in income, occupations, partner characteristics, period or cohort effects. These results contradict role expansionist theory, which suggests that men and women profit similarly from moderate work hours; they support role conflict theory, which claims that men are most satisfied with longer and women with shorter work hours.

"""

For tech talent, it's easy to only spend 25hrs a week working and the rest on a startup idea with no loss of satisfaction. People in tech are paid well.

But this is a study of 700,000 people in multiple countries. I assume that 'working' to them is more of a "I can't pay the bills this month if I don't work overtime" kind of thing.

I can see how survival fears would put a damper on working less.

Given that the topic is pretty politicized and they didn't go into that much detail about controlling for possible confounding variables, I think the author is trying to express their personal beliefs through a study. I think the data is interesting but the title jumps to a conclusion that IMO the analysis doesn't support (yet).

By looking at his blog, the author has a pretty pronounced conservative bias - enough to justify a sizeable grain of salt while reading it.

https://www.martin-schroeder.de/en/blog/

No way. I reduced to 30 hours a week and I’m never going back to full time. I use the extra time for my own projects or other things that need to get done. Such a huge improvement in quality of life.

From the intro: "Conflict theory argues that an individual’s time and energy are limited."

No. That's a fact!