Amanda at Pandagon linked last week to this summary of a study from the journal Sex Roles, reporting that college-aged women spent considerably less time playing video games than their male counterparts. No surprise there, but the key explanation for the discrepancy is chilling:
“Our findings suggest that one reason women play fewer games than men is because they are required to fulfill more obligatory activities, leaving them less available leisure time,†said Jillian Winn of MSU’s Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies and Media, and one of the co-authors of the study.
To be precise, the study found that college-aged women did sixteen hours “more work” per week (chores, jobs, and so forth). As Amanda pointed out, that finding dwarfs the discussion of video games; it points to further evidence of what Courtney Martin talks about in her marvelous Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters and what on this blog is called “The Martha Complex”. Young women today are increasingly likely to be over-worked, anxious, and beset by fears of failure; a growing percentage of their brothers are hooked on pot, porn, and Playstation, prioritizing “chilling out” over virtually any other waking activity. And an extraordinary number of these lads have women in their lives — mothers, sisters, girlfriends — cleaning up after them (a traditional sex role) and providing for them financially (something of an innovation.)
This time discrepancy is rooted in many things, it seems. Of course, some of it is rooted in the contemporary cultural ideal that, as Courtney Martin says, tells girls that they “can be anything” but implies that in order to do so, that they must somehow “do everything.” Over-caffeinated, over-achieving, and over-scheduled, a great many women are beset by anxiety. But it would be wrong to suggest that the problem is primarily in women’s heads. The time gap that forces so many college-aged, childless women to work a “second shift” is indeed frequently a result of direct pressure from parents and the community.
The lower the expectations for male behavior, the higher the expectations for female success and self-control. This is not only obvious and axiomatic, it has real-life repercussions in the lives of a great many young women. Many of my students come from immigrant families in which there are strict household divisions of labor; women cook and clean, men take out trash and fix cars. Given that cooking, cleaning, and laundry are daily and time-consuming activities compared to mowing lawns or emptying garbage cans, many of my female students take the same academic loads as their brothers while doing twice as much work at home. In many families, a young man is encouraged to do his homework so that he can then go out with his friends and play video games; his sister is told to help with the chores, and when everything else is done, she can then turn to her own homework.
In some families, a daughter’s academic achievement is less important than that of a son, and hence she is expected to do more traditional “women’s work” in addition to (and usually before) her studies. But from what I can tell from my students, the pressure to succeed academically falls equally on girls and boys. The difference is that the family tends to assume that sons aren’t as capable of doing laundry or handling the grocery shopping or washing up the dishes. Boys are allowed to be more single-minded in their focus on success, while their sisters are expected to perform traditional female roles as well as earning straight As. With that in mind, it’s not hard to account for an extra 16 hours of work per week.
Young women with the Martha Complex also tend to have a sense of near-panic about running out of time. Most Marthas set timetables for themselves: “I will have my degree at 22, meet my future husband by the time I’m 24, have my law degree at 26 and buy a house in the suburbs at 29.” Warned over-and-over again about the dangers of waiting too long to start a family; warned to get a good education with a good job so that they “won’t have to rely on a man”, a great many young women have one eye on the calendar, watching with a barely suppressed sense of panic as their carefully designed plans crumble beneath the weight of too much to do and too little time in which to do it. A sour economy cuts jobs and cuts college course offerings, wreaking further havoc with the precious — but whoppingly unrealistic — timetables. And while their brothers might take advantage of a slumping economy to live at home indefinitely, protesting that “since there’s no work and all the classes are closed, I have no choice but to play Halo all day”, young women grow even more frantic, often doubling up on work or taking classes simultaneously at different colleges. Helping out a struggling family and sticking to that damn timetable leaves little time or energy for video games. Apparently, on average, 16 hours per week less.
We do need to do a much better job of offering reassurance to young women, carefully noting the ways in which we as adults or peers inculcate and reinforce perfectionism. But we cannot escape the reality that we pressure our daughters more as a result of pressuring our sons less; high expectations for girls are linked to an unwillingness to hold young men to an equally high standard. The peddlers of the notion that we have a boy crisis in this country tell us our boys can’t sit still, can’t focus as well, can’t develop intellectually as rapidly as girls. As that notion of male weakness becomes ever more widespread, the hopes and dreams of families get foisted on to daughters, who are presumed to be both more compliant and more capable of following direction. The less we expect from our sons, the more crushing the burden we place on their sisters. This doesn’t mean we ought to return to beating inattentive third-grade boys. It does mean that we need to recognize that our current consensus that boys develop more slowly than girls has devastating repercussions in the lives of our daughters.
Boys can sit still, focus, and work. And in order to create a more balanced adolescent culture; in order to create a more egalitarian world; in order to reduce the pressure on our daughters we must raise the expectations on our sons to the point that all of our expectations are equal. Until we do that, the anxiety epidemic will claim more victims.
And people wonder why girls are getting better grades than boys in school. Not that it is translating to higher paychecks and career success though, so it’s not like girls are reaping proportional benefits at the end of the day.
Another factor is the gaming industry targeting males far more heavily than females in almost all of their products. Like much of the rest of the entertainment industry, gaming is largely male owned and operated, and the male gaze is evident across the field of developers. Women often are merely side characters to provide motive or plot to the male protagonist’s story. It boggles the mind that developers continue to push things like Imagine Babyz for their female audience when all they really need to do is make stories and characters that aren’t pandering to the male audience.
@ ElleDee, girls getting better grades than boys in school is a relatively new phenomenon (according to the BBC article I read on it, if this isn’t true someone correct me), and with the shrinking gap between male vs female wages, hopefully this will balance the scale. Still, that doesn’t address the problem that men outnumber women in fields that often garnish higher wages. Usually they’re fields that have pretty high math skill requirements like finance, accounting, engineering, computer science, etc. IMO the problem starts young when girls are conditioned away from math and career councilors don’t suggest math oriented fields for women, even when they’re good at math.
and the male gaze is evident across the field of developers
Understatement of the year.
“in order to reduce the pressure on our daughters we must raise the expectations on our sons to the point that all of our expectations are equal.”
I don’t understand this. You say expectations are too high on girls, so the solution is to raise expectations on boys. But if the expectations are too high how does it make sense to subject boys to the same unrealistic expectations. It makes sense to help girls learn more realistic, healthy expectations. Pressure on children is not a zero sum game where increasing or decreasing on one person,group, or sex leads to less pressure on another.
One point they mentioned in that (weak) summary of the study was that time spent playing games was not related to GPA, so the time boys spent playing wasn’t’ having a negative effect in that realm.a
Greg, if the cost of a film is $10, and Mary contributes $8 and Mark contributes $2, the burden is uneven. If we raise expectations on Mark, he can start coughing up $5 and Mary can reduce her contribution to the same $5. As with the ticket, so with virtually everything else.
Who are Mark and Mary and why are they having “hopes and dreams” foisted on them? I’m not sure that parents should be living through their kids.
The one thing I can say is as a society we put to much emphasis on ‘Grades’ in school. Unless you finish number one in you major, your grades make little difference unless you want to pursue an even more advanced education.
I had a solid ‘C’ average in High School, did not finish University… I work in a department of 14 people. I am the least educated, but make the same amount of money or more in some cases. I am the senior person in the group because people like working with me. I am not the nose to the grind stone guy… the general consensus is ‘Paul’ get’s the job done… my perspective ‘I get what needs to be done… done’. Will I ever be management… Nope, because I don’t have a degree. But I am happy retiring as the lead/senior worker over being management.
But, I have had a better quality of life for the past 20ty years than my 12 of 14 co-workers who may get a shot at management (as in ’1′ will probably make it to that level). He/She will have spent another decade or more in school to achieve that. The other 11 who the management position will never materialize for have made an investment in preparing for a job they will never have. That investment will never pay off while I in comparison played my PS3 and drank beer at the pub.
The women in my group work twice as hard as the men… but I see it giving them no edge over the men. I would actually say, their work ethic works against them. They are looked at as not leading balanced lives (to be honest), and so how can an ‘un-balanced’ person lead???. Education is just a check mark as they battle for a higher GPA to prove to the world ‘they are qualified’. It’s one question in that crucial interview… ‘Do you have an MBA’ Yes… next question… How do you balance work and life? Ohhh you don’t, next candidate.
The actual study is here, which is a much better link than any popular media article. We should all be familiar with the science news cycle
The women in the study worked ~24 hours/week at a paying job, against only ~9 for the men. Which means that working for money is the main source of the disparity in how much men and women have obligations. So families aren’t requiring men and women to contribute much different in obligatory labour, (homework was 9 hours for women vs. 8 for men, doesn’t see as significant, but it does make up the missing hour of obligatory work).
So “why’re women working more jobs?” is really the question here. As I understand it, American colleges/universities are ridiculously expensive, so college/university (sorry college here keeps grating on my Canadian sensibilities, I’m probably bunging up the language) definitely need a lot of money. Are families supporting female students less? Are families capable of supporting both the same? (As women are 60% of undergrads, and men 40%, I don’t see a reason to suppose they come from the same economic classes – admittedly, here my experience fails me, my own undergrad was at the Ontario university with probably the poorest undergrads, most conservative, only predominately male (men were ~52% of undergrads), and we were supporting ourselves through a lot more than I’m led to believe is typical) Do women want/need work experience for future employment prospects? Do women want/need more money than men for some reason?
Also, the study claims men have ~4 more hours of leisure time a week, compared with women. From this ought I to infer that men sleep two more hours a day than women do?
Peter, also worth mentioning is that often when fields begin to have many women enter them, the prestige of the entire field takes a nosedive and the pay falls. As I recall, this is especially evident in medicine where there used to not be that many female doctors, but now that there are, the specialties that they gravitate toward have taken a hit. If I was a good internet commenter I’d try and find a source for that, but I’m in a hurry today.
Thank you, Brian, for that sensible clarification.
I thought Hugo was making a huge leap to assume the disparity must be due entirely to sexism against women (and reacting with a completely irrational solution, i.e. “There’s too much pressure on women! Therefore we must increase the pressure on men!”). Two questions that pop into my mind about the disparity were:
1. To what extent were the numbers affected by the women who chose to become single parents (you know, this phenomenon)? If you removed those from the study, what would the disparity look like then?
2. To what extent were the numbers affected by the greater numbers of female college attendees? If, as Brian points out, there are 50% more female attendees than male attendees, there could very well be a class issue involved. Men from working class backgrounds may be foregoing college and opting to work full time earlier (due to sexist pressures of an entirely different kind), while significant numbers of women from those same backgrounds attend college. This would skew the resulting male college-attending population towards those who were either wealthier or who have some kind of scholarship to help them, and therefore less of a need to work while going to class.
Before we start generalizing about why “women work more hours” we need to take account of the fact that this is a small study, of less than 300 people. A self selected set of respondents who were promised extra credit for filling out a survey. So I’m doubtful we can conclude anything about college student paid work hours by gender without a more representative sample.
But why look further. “16 hours more work a week” is such a satisfying nugget of Patriarchal unfairness…
While I’m not saying my experience as the father of a 12 y.o. girl indicates anything at all, the study is interesting. I’m not living vicariously thru my daughter but I do hope that she charts a better path than I did. Parents can go too far in indoctrinating their daughters but me and my wife are within the limits in offering our wisdom, e.g. schooling helps you to be independent, enjoying your career is more important than money and to always keep an open mind.
Just my 2 cents thanks!
The difference in work load is not the only reason that men tend to play more games than women. The gaming industry and lifestyle is typically extremely misogynistic. I personally have avoided online MPG’s for this very reason. I personally have no desire to be constantly bombarded by the misogyny of the other male players, which is something that tends to happen in online games. When playing with males in the flesh, then you have to deal with the stereotypes of women being poorer players than men. Or, as has happened to me, men being extremely poor losers when faced with a woman that they can not beat at a particular game. I have had men throw down their controllers and stomp away when they were unable to beat me at a particular game.
Ren actually had a great post up about this on Feministe recently:
feministe.us/blog/archives/2009/07/29/hey-baby-why-all-the-aggro/
I think this is a middle-to-upper-middle-class thing, and that it’s based on a middle-to-upper-middle-class assumption which may or may not be justified. I believe that parents in this class or income bracket assume that their sons will be able, barring hazards or accidents, to ascend to their own financial position, but that their daughters, barring windfalls or luck, may not prove so fortunate. That’s what accounts for the difference in workload. It is supposed (whether reasonably or not) that the boys will get breaks the girls won’t come in for and that the girls will have to work harder to keep up to the middle-class mark as a result.
Girls were once encouraged to cultivate in themselves the traits which would enable them to marry at-par or up. Girls are now encouraged to develop those traits in themselves which will enable them to grind, not marry, their way into something like a status. Consequently it’s not surprising that girls aren’t incited to spend hours messing around with the Sims. It is girls, not boys, who have to learn how to handle real life: if they don’t, real life will handle them, possibly not kindly. Or such is the theory, which may or may not be reality-based.
Sweating Through Fog: There have been a number of studies showing that women have less leisure time than men. Google “women” and “housework,” for starters.
This study by Wharton professor Joel Waldfogel indicates that in fact, men and women in developed nations work just about the same when you count both paid work and housework. Men have a little more leisure because they apparently scrimp on sleep more than women.
Gigi,
Hugo wasn’t quoting studies in general. He was highlighting the article, and making sweeping claims about college-aged women, of the form: “See!!!”- “See what I’ve been telling you!!” “16 hours a week!!” Those poor, put-upon young women, especially when comparing with their good-for-nothing, degenerate male peers who are allowed to skate through life with just a smile and a shoeshine.
It’s all so silly, speculating and extrapolating from a self-selected survey of 300 college students.
“To be precise, the study found that college-aged women did sixteen hours “more work†per week (chores, jobs, and so forth).”
The very first statement Hugo makes is precisely wrong. I’m no social scientist, but I’m dead certain that you can conclude nothing about the relative leisure time of college-aged women as compared to college-aged men from this paper. The survey was of college attendees, not college-aged people. Leaving aside the most general question of men’s leisure time from women’s leisure time, to draw any conclusion on the split of leisure time among the college-aged, you’d have to factor in college-aged people who are in prison. And the abundance of non-paid, non-housework, non-child caring leisure time they’ve been blessed with.
Wow, this describes the dynamic of my family to a tee. My brother is lucky to have a C average. He never helps with the cooking or cleaning, and his attitude creates so much stress in my mother’s and my life that we both have developed things like ulcers and migraines from the stress.
On the other hand, I beat myself up for not getting into an Ivy League for my undergrad. I have nightmares of not getting into a first tier law school. I dropped a thousand of my own hard-earned money (I’ve worked since the day, literally the day, I turned 16) on a LSAT tutoring service that is 12 hours a week of instruction. I take a full-time senior load of Philosophy while working on my undergraduate thesis. I work a part-time job as an administrative assistant.
But when I get home, I have to beg and plead and scream for a moment of silence to concentrate and do my work while my brother plays his drums, plays Halo until 3am, and is generally a loud jerk. If my mother needs help cooking, cleaning, or doing anything (and I mean anything, I self-educated myself on computers and cars, while my brother doesn’t know how to check someone’s tire pressure) she asks me. Never him. I do the dishes, he takes out the trash. Sometimes. After it’s overflowing. I cook and clean and help my mother do the shopping, the mending, and the washing. He makes a mess, acts like a jerk, and gets a C average.
This dynamic isn’t unusual. I see it replicated over and over and over with my female friends. It’s a running joke in my circle that everyone who is either gay or female (or both) has a job, while the straight men don’t. And it’s true: none of them do. Most of them don’t even have cars.
It doesn’t sunrise me at all that boys don’t do shit but sit around and play video games while women wait on them hand and foot. My mother does it, I do it, my grandmother does it, my stepmother does it, my female friends do it. Every woman and girl I know behaves or is treated like an indentured servant who needs to cook, clean, and go to Yale.
Sorry to get all bitter over your blog. But hey, story of my life.
Jen, without in any way blaming you for your brother’s stuff, the only way to stop the cycle is to stop. You can’t help how your mom treats you, but you can help what you do.
That’s a very interesting article. Very helpful!
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Saw a study about the same thing.
However, as one reviewer noted, a wife said “she drove to Grandma’s house”. Hubby, when he was driving, said “We went to Grandma’s house.” There were other examples.
That counted as work for the wife, but not the guy, since he didn’t list it as work.
Until that issue is cleared up, no study can be counted on.